


Quest to a Place of Extreme Unpleasantness

by RedPen (GardenVatiety)



Series: The Wounded World [1]
Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, F/M, Fantasy, Magic, Quests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-11-06 08:25:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11032395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GardenVatiety/pseuds/RedPen
Summary: What are we to make of the fate of this world, when hearts turn to evil, and beasts beyond imagining are clawing at the gates? When all rests in the paws of the last breathing Custodian and a sell-sword in black? Their mission is perilous. The stakes are immeasurable. And they don't much like each other, either...A little fantasy AU. Hope you like it!





	1. An Unlikely Alliance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Welcome to a fun little digression; a fantasy AU with a greater focus on playful action and adventure. Nothing serious yet; this won't edge out Of Salt And Steel in the long run. But sometimes you need a break from things...

 

The little grey rabbit held out her paws to the flame, hoping to syphon off all the warmth she could.

Warmth was, after all, in short supply up here at the black mountain’s summit, where an icy wind blew eternal over the jagged, ebony crag, cutting with a razor’s edge. Fragments of grit, hurled by the constant gale, streamed over the rocks. Nothing grew in this forbidding place, besides a few devilish thorn bushes with stiletto points.

The Deadstones were, it seemed, aptly named, and none more than their highest point, Black Peak.

This night, the eye of the moon was blinded by a blanket of midnight cloud, robbing the term ‘black as pitch’ of its figurative meaning; it was as dark as the underworld itself tonight.

Save, of course, for this one tiny campfire, which cast a brave light against the crushing weight of the void, desperately keeping whatever horrors that stalked in its murk away.

There were two figures huddled about its meek glow.

One, the rabbit, gazed into the sparks with deep distraction, with a philosopher’s intensity, unravelling a truth of the world. Her dress marked her out as something rather more martial than a scholar; under the purple cloak she had draped over her shoulders were glimpses of chainmail and gourd-leather, well-oiled and maintained. A dagger hung from her belt, amongst other accoutrements common to the adventurer -- a water-skin, satchels with food and medicine, a length of coiled rope -- and, within easy reach, a short sword in a black scabbard, resting against the rocks a short distance away.

Close observation would also reveal she had three deep scars along the ridge of her left cheek, a memento of some less fortunate day, but one she had clearly survived. She might have been small, but Judith was not the sort to be confronted without consideration.

Who could guess what memories she was reliving with such focus, watching as the cinders tumbled upwards in a vain attempt join their cousin stars in the night sky, somewhere beyond the impenetrable clouds.

Her concentration cracked, however, when her companion (if she were feeling charitable, she would call him this) began to whistle.

The same tune as last time. The same tune as he always did.

Her brows collapsed inward in a frown, and she fixed him with a glare across the fire.

"Stop that, Nick," she said.

The shadowy figure held the last note, letting it hang in the air, until it slowly shrivelled into a silent breath. He then tipped his head back so that his green eyes emerged from the shadow of his hood, and gave her a grin to match his sardonic, provocative stare. Gods, she  _hated_ that look of his.

"What’s wrong, Carrots? Don't you appreciate music?" he asked.

She scowled; it was a ploy to draw her into an argument, she knew. Worse still, it usually worked. Being insufferable was sport to her travel-mate, and he was a champion athlete.

Skilled as he was at the jester’s craft, he didn't strictly bear the presence of one. He was dressed head to foot in black gourd-leather: gloves, boots, tunic and belt. A sable cloak was thrown over the entire ensemble. He looked like he could sneak away from his own shadow, if the need arose. Hanging from his sides was brace of deadly-sharp daggers, and a clutch of throwing knives was prominent on his chest.

Not a hint of fur to be seen. Only when he tossed his hood back was there a show of orange fur. An indication that he was a fox.

"Just...don't,” Judith muttered. “I don't want your tuneless whistling to draw the attention of a rock asp or something.”

"You've nothing to fear, Long-Ears," Nick chuckled. "Should that occur, I'll come to your rescue and suck the poison right out, where ever the bite may be."

Nick was lucky that Judith required his assistance, because saving that she would have knocked him unconscious with the hilt of her sword and been rid of him. The only thing he seemed to take seriously was being an irritation. But she did need his help, or just help in general from any mammal; there hadn't been many candidates raising their paws on the count.

She had spent the entirety of her life cloistered in the gardens of her homeland until...well, until the tragedy that had set events on their current course, that had wrought grievous wrongs that needed setting right.

Her lack of familiarity with the outside world at large had necessitated her contracting Nick to her service, for he seemed to have a limitless store of varied knowledge; where the best prices could be fetched, local mammals of importance, the geography of the region, which gangs could be dealt with, and which should be fled from; the ever-valuable, indefinable wisdom of the streets. He maintained that he had acquired this wealth of intelligence in his years as an honest sell-sword, but Judith wondered what Nick made of the word honesty, exactly. She assumed he’d plied his skills as a cutpurse or cut-throat at least a few times before.

Still, however he'd come by this venal acumen, he had it, and she needed it, and he was willing to trade it for gold. And there was one other thing; Nick knew how to use his knives. Judith thought them shameful -- a weapon for dishonourable assassins and thugs -- but he could certainly hold his own in a fight with them. She was certain that would come in handy, before this quest of hers had run its course.

But, still... _why him?_  

Why, of all the mammals who might have been available and willing to accept her payment, of all the mercenaries and wandering warriors who had the mettle for the task…

Why this one?

This limitless store of irritation and insensitivity, somehow crammed into a four-foot tall container of fox?

"You're not to touch me, okay? Don't. Ever. I'd rather die screaming in agony from asp venom than have you put your lips anywhere near me."

"You're too humble, Carrots," Nick shot back. "I'd never impugn your maiden's honour, naturally. But I couldn't sit idle and let you suffer, if such a thing were to happen. So, rest safe in the knowledge; if some foul, venomous beast ever lays a scratch on you, I promise I'll..."

"Ugh!" she groaned, pulling her hood over her ears. Still his mocking voice snuck in.

"...do the valorous thing, and clamp my mouth over the wound -- without thought for my own safety, mind you -- and suck and suck, even if the wound is..."

Judith stood up. She almost said more, but she knew she had fallen into his trap. It was his way; to call her cute, to call her Carrots, or to just be so unbearably crass that she started arguing back, that she threw fuel on the fire. Not tonight -- she was at the frayed end of her patience, and they'd waited long enough.

"We're going. We're going right now. Ready the torches."

The strangest thing about Nick was that his face just swelled to accommodate his smile -- his grin could always grow by just a little more, and never seemed to slither of the side of his head. He reached into his rucksack and withdrew two wooden shafts, accompanied by the sweet stink of combustible emberwood sap. He touched the torch-ends to the campfire, and they both burst into flame. Judith then tipped her water-skin over the fire, chocking it down to wet black ash.

"To hurry now might be a mistake, Carrots," he said, passing her one of the glowing torches. "I can see just fine in the night, but aren't you frightened? Shouldn't we wait until the comfort of the morning sun?"

"I'm going. You can wait here and get eaten to death by bloodlice if it pleases you. Do me a favour. Don't expect to get paid, though."

Nick gave his tail a proud little swish, satisfied he’d won this little verbal sortie, and said, “Very well. Do you want me to take the lead, or should I keep watch from behind and protect your cute little backside?”

“Walk in front of me, and give me a minute of blessed silence, would you?” she ground out. They’d barely been in company for two weeks, and she imagined her teeth were already being worn down to the gums. “Just head towards the peak.”

Nick hefted his torch, gave her a provocative wink, and the pair began to pick their way over the rough terrain, heading towards the mountain’s imposing crown.

 

\--------

 

An hour or so passed, thankfully without them being eaten by midnight monsters, or Nick singing, when they found themselves unable to go any further; the walkable path had ended at an impassable wall.

Nick put his paw on the rough surface, gliding his hands over its rough, marble-slick surface.

“This won’t be easy to climb,” he said, and the absence of a joke Judith took as an indicator of his seriousness. “Little in the way of paw holds. Little to sink a grapple into.”

“We don’t need to climb anything,” Judith said, which broke the spell of Nick’s solemnity immediately.

“Oh, of course not. Because standing at the base of this sheer cliff definitely has the feel of a journey come to a successful end.”

Judith rolled her eyes, and pushed him out of the way, placing both her paws on the rough rock.

“I mean, you told me it was a quest of the utmost importance, and buttressed that claim with substantial payment for my participation, and standing on this lifeless stone in the middle of the night, with no one and nothing for miles…yes, I definitely have the acute sense of saving the world.”

Judith, for once, had tuned him out; she could feel magic. Even though there was only cold, unyielding stone under her paws, she swore she was touching something warm with life, something with breath and a pulse.

“Step back, Nick,” she said, silencing his tirade. He shot her a look, but for once didn’t brook further argument. He took a pace away, and watched in something halfway between amusement and worry (not for her sanity, but that he had followed this thinwit into the depths of the wilderness), as she pressed her cheek against the mountainside, fingers splayed on the rocks.

“You’re here. I can feel you,” she whispered, eyes closed.

One paw slipped under the collar of her tunic, and came out with a small blue stone, hanging from the end of a silver chain. Nick caught a glimpse of it, and raised an eyebrow; she had alluded to this artefact before, but had been adamant that it be kept away from the sight of all others, him included. Maybe him especially. Supposedly, the stone had some remarkable arcane power. And perhaps it was more than a mere trinket; Nick noticed that it was starting to glow.

And then Judith spoke, and in a tongue that few had heard before. A tongue forgotten by the world, buried in the dust of ages.

All Nick heard was a collection of foreign and harsh sounds come from Judith.

“ _Elbsha shalfahiem nook ner iyat.”_

Nonsense to him.

But the mountain could hear it. The mountain understood.

Judith stepped back, and a needlepoint of bright light suddenly appeared under where her paw had been. Nick stared at it, struggling to mask his surprise -- it looked like a star from the heavens had tumbled out of the firmament and come to rest on the earth.

The needlepoint then grew -- become a finger-width, became a pawprint, became a cart-wheel-- until it was easily taller than Nick. Bright as it was, Nick was amazed that he could look at it without a hint of discomfort; a sun that did not scour the eyes. He noticed that, around the circle’s rim, tiny and unfamiliar glyphs danced, twisting and bending like moonlight on the surface of a river.

And then, swifter had it had appeared, the white circle vanished. Blinked out of existence.

It left an indisputable reminder that it was no hallucination, though; where it had emanated from the cliffside was a perfectly-round hole. A passageway.

Nick stepped towards it, and placed his paw on the edge of this newly-foundered tunnel. It was cold to the touch.

He turned to Judith, who was consciously tucking the gemstone back into her tunic, and said, “Well, that is an impressive trick. No court jester could hope to compete.”

“It’s not a slight of paw,” Judith growled, before remembering Nick was trying to needle her into complaining. She sighed, and said, “You felt the wall yourself. It was solid, granite through and through. And now there is an entrance.”

“So, that blue gem. Is that the Tooth?”

Judith shot him a guarded look. “The less you know, Nick, the better.”

Nick fired back that trade-mark grin; she probably suspected him of trying to steal it.

“Well, Carrots, whether this a clever parlour trick or honest sorcery, you’re right that the way forward is clear…am I right to presume you want me to go first?”

“I didn’t pay you to come up here because I want your company, Nick,” said Judith. “You’ve only been paid half, and if you want the full amount then you had better start doing more than trying to goad me into throwing you off the mountain top. Lead the way.”

That ever expansive grin again. He waved his torch inside the tunnel mouth, clearing out the shadows, checking that nothing with teeth and a temper lurked just inside, and then he drew one of his daggers, glittering and perfectly-sharp.

“What are we going to find in these caverns, Carrots?”

She gave him a serious look; this time, even the joke didn’t make her eye twitch.

“I don’t know.”

With that, the pair stepped inside, the clap of their boots against the stone floor and the light of their torches growing fainter as they went into the depths, until it vanished completely.

Shortly after, that piercing white light returned -- there one moment, gone the next, snow-flake ephemeral -- and the cliffside was returned to its original fullness. No hint of the tunnel remained at all.

Somewhere off in the infinite night, a stormcrow took to the sky with an echoing, prophetic screech.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When Nick and Judy first get thrown together in the movie, things are a little rougher than snarky back-and-forth; they really seem to dislike each other. I decided that seemed like fun to write, so I packaged it up in a fantasy story. I hope that I'll be able to knock this out pretty quick; no research about 18th century politics, sailcraft or urban life, just magic and swords and all that good stuff. It's what I need at the moment, at least until my professional commitments take a breather. Enjoy!


	2. Secrets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe the idea that these would be quick to write was a bit over-optimistic...well, it's here now!

_Amazing,_ thought Nick, tracing the point of his dagger across the wall of the tunnel. _Perfectly smooth, like polished marble._

He’d heard of sorcerers before. They caught glimpses of possible futures in crystal balls, or scried into the mind to see one’s deepest emotions and fears; in his experience, nothing so impressive that a charlatan couldn’t mimic it to fool a gullible crowd.

But this? This was something else entirely. These enchanted relics Judith was on the hunt for -- these _Teeth_ \-- were genuine.

Now, that changed a few things...

“Would you cut that noise out?” Judith hissed, and he tilted his head over his shoulder to look at her. She waved irritably at the sharp scrape his knife-tip was making against the smooth wall.

That provoking grin again. He sheathed his dagger.

“What exactly, Judith, is likely to hear us coming? We’re heading into the heart of a remote mountain, so well disguised that you had to conjure the front door from nothing. It certainly isn’t flesh and blood bandits who’ll prick their ears. Will we find stone golems lurking in here? Beasts to frighten young ones?”

“The fact that it’s you doing it is reason enough for it to stop,” she fired back, “but I haven’t any idea what might be in here. It might be golems. It might be a horrible black dragon with two heads. It might be _nothing at all_. Let’s not wake it, in any case.”

“Well, it would be a danger to wake a dreaded Nothing…”

Their chatter came to a halt as they realised they’d come to the end of the tunnel, and a roadblock as well; a rockslide, it seemed, had filled it in.

“Carrots, it would seem we’re trapped in a sarcophagus, now,” Nick said, reaching out and running his paw over the stones that walled in the tunnel. Most of them were large, and promised that their weight would match their size. They had no shovel or pry-bar; clearing the way would be impossible. He turned to her, regarding her in the torchlight. “Do you, per chance, have a supernatural solution for this problem?”

Judith stepped past him, and stood before the cave-in. Again, she produced her magic stone, taking a brief look over her shoulder at Nick, at his greedy curiosity. There were no incantations this time; just a soft light from the jewel, which began to swell and spread, running down Judith’s arms to her pawtips, growing in intensity until the confines of the tunnel were ocean-blue.

The light now stuck to the rocks like cobwebs, and for a brief moment they glowed so bright that blue became white. Nick watched this with contained interest.

Suddenly, with a furious roar, the stones were hurled backwards, thrown into the air as if struck by a giant’s fist. They bounced into the shadows beyond, echoing sharply as they went, until finally silence returned.

“And you admonish me for my noise, huh?” Nick said, but quietly he was impressed. He had seen two inexplicable feats this day, and there seemed the promise of more to come.

“Well, now we won’t die and be mummified in a hole underground,” Judith muttered, tucking the gem back inside her collar.

“Why did you even see fit to hire me, anyway, seeing as how you have a blessed trinket to solve your problems? What use am I exactly?”

“I ask myself this every day,” Judith said.

“Don’t ever ask me to fetch firewood again,” Nick returned, and they stepped from the tunnel into the gloom beyond, surveying this new darkness with their torches.

They’d come to a vaulting cavern, wide and vast enough that their firelight was eaten up before it touched the walls. All they could see with their torches was a circle of rough ground underfoot, and empty coal-blackness all around.

That was all they could _see_ , but Nick stepped forward and sniffed deeply, his face wrinkled in concentration. Judith eyed him; Nick looking serious was a minor miracle, and a sure bellwether that something might be wrong.

“Can you smell that, Judith?” Nick asked. A rabbit’s sense of smell was not the equal to a fox’s, but it was good enough to detect whatever had Nick worried.

“Yeah…” she said.

The smell of death. Of stale bones. Flesh gone to dust.

Judith was about to engage Nick in a discussion about the possible import of detecting the smell of dead things in a forgotten mountain cave, when she noticed something else.

“Hold on. Nick, does it feel cold in here?”

“As a devout’s tit,” he muttered. He was squinting into the darkness, which was so complete that it challenged his night-sight.

“It’s cool because there’s a breeze, Nick.”

They both paused, exchanging glances.

At that moment, high above them, the clouds cleared away from the moon, and a river of silvery light began to pour into the cavern through a broad rent in its roof, laying bare its secrets, making the source of the malodour apparent.

Scattered around the floor were skeletons. Of rams, horses, hogs, wolves and bison, all relics of some long-forgotten war; hanging from their bones were various bits of armour, rusted iron and decaying leather, swords and hammers and bows still clutched in defiance of death. Hundreds of them, perhaps.

Their equipment was of a variety that demanded explanation. Amongst the weapons were the scimitars of desert-dwellers; the heavy iron maces of the Cold Mountain clans; a folded-steel katana or two; some ugly wooden clubs, nearly fossilised with age. Elegant sabres clutched right next to common broadswords. Likewise, some wore bits of plate mail or gourd-leather, recognisable as the work of common smiths, where here and there were the decayed husks of headscarfs, chain-link chadris, jade scales and leather masks -- armour and arms from innumerable continents and kingdoms, from past to near-present.

There wasn’t the faintest indication of how this palimpsest of long-dead soldiers became entombed here.

But Nick and Judith almost didn’t notice this company of the dead, for the second secret the moon’s touch revealed was stranger still.

It stood far away from them, on the other side of the cavern.

It was a tree.

Even at a glance, Nick could tell it was not ordinary.

It was massive, for one thing. It towered into the air, as tall as a castle parapet, dwarfing everything else within view. And while to it seemed to imitate the form of a tree, with long branches spread into the sheltered darkness, it had a bizarre, crystalline appearance. A faux-natural straightness.

They were separated from it by a deep black chasm that ran from one side of the cave to the other, and who knows how deep. An arching, natural stone crossing had once connected both sides, but it had crumbled long ago, turned into a series of floating chunks strung together with great loops of tree-root, like some perilous rope bridge. It was the only possible passage over the chasm’s forbidding, shadowed depths.

Nick stood dumb-struck by this subterranean wonder. _How on earth did it get here,_ he thought. Sure, rain and light could trickle through that great opening above it, but the ground underfoot was lifeless and unyielding, as nurturing as an orphan’s upbringing.

“Carrots…” Nick mumbled, unblinking.

“It’s a Deep-Oak,” Judith said, her voice breathy with surprise. They were a story to her; she had been told of them by her grand-aunt, the village apothecary and botanist, who had shown her pictures in a great, dust-worn tome. She’d never imagined she’d see one herself, though.

“They’re not trees, as such,” she continued, answering Nick’s unasked question. “They don’t shoot leaves, and they don’t need water or sunlight; they grow out of the bare earth and in the shadows.”

“They’re not made of wood, then?” Nick tilted his head to one side. “Do they grow fruit?”

“They do, but not often, and not many. And they’re not for eating, either; if you touch or taste it, you’ll be turned to stone.”

“What?”

“Petrified. They’re called Gorgon’s Treats.”

Nick’s gaze returned to the perplexing rampike, rising from a nest of its own roots.

"We need to cross to it," Judith said.

"We do?" Nick said, eyebrow raised. "We need to get closer to the tree that will kill us? By crossing a hole that vanishes into the earth's core?"

"Yes, we do,” she said, pointing towards the heights of the tree. “Can you see that?"

There, nestled in its angular boughs, was a small, twinkling purple light. Barely perceptible, and yet somehow unmissable.

"Is that your prize?" Nick asked.

Judith nodded.

“Well, lead on then,” he muttered, and they started to make their way over to the crossing.

“I’ll tell you this, Carrots; this is certainly the strangest place I’ve ever been invited,” Nick said.

“I don’t believe that, Nick. Your past is suspect at best -- contracted, not invited, I’ll remind you.”

“Even so, this still takes the prize. An underground stone tree, huh? What’s next…lava streaming from the open sky? Clouds that spit fire?”

Judith kept quiet, partly because she didn’t want to rule the possibility out.

“And further, what’s with these bones scattered all about?” Nick continued. “How did they get here? It’s like someone placed them here deliberately to frighten idiots…” He stopped and prised an intact skeletal hand off the haft of a rusting axe, raising it up to inspect it. “You know, make us ‘paws’ in fear…”

“Funny…” Judith deadpanned.

“How would you know, Teeth? You’d need a sense of humour to judge that.” He reached out with the fleshless paw and tapped her on the nose with its extended finger.

“Nick, cut that out! Put it down!”

Nick scratched his chin with the same bony digit. “Well, Carrots, if I didn’t know better I’d suspect you of being frightened of some dusty old bones.”

“Nick, put it down…”

“Seems strange, since you certainly dress the part of a warrior. I guess I assumed you’d have the mettle to match. Or do long-dead corpses just particularly offend your delicate, lady-rabbit sensibilities?”

“Nick…”

Suddenly he noticed her eyes. They were wide and staring. Maybe not with fear, but definitely with concern. With…perhaps a dash of fear thrown in.

He followed the line of her gaze to the bony paw in his grasp.

Its fingers were wiggling independently, like a scribe stretching a cramp. Then, they very clearly gave Nick the forks.

Nick’s expression quickly mirrored Judith’s own, and he tossed the hand away with a disgusted gasp. It clattered against the rough ground, where it began to scuttle about like some huge aggrieved beetle.

The pair stared at this animate skeletal paw in shock. A silence descended inside the cavern, punctuated only by the clack of bony pawtips on stone. Tense, horrible silence. A silence that the two of them knew was about to be annihilated.

It began as a dry, rasping noise, a cemetery wind, the breath of something not living. And then, all around them, the bones began to stir, to knit themselves back together, the fragments becoming whole again.

Soon, Nick and Judith were staring about themselves in disbelief at a resurrected army, diabolical under the red gleam of the torchfire, their eye sockets black pools. They menaced the pair with ancient weapons, their unmuscled jaws hanging agape in silent hostility.

Nick’s eyes darted over this nightmare horde as he drew one of his daggers.

“Carrots,” he whispered, “they’re skeletons. They’re undead. We’re surrounded by the undead. And they look angry that we aren’t dead as well…”

Judith unsheathed her sword, its silver edge flashing bright in the gloom. There was nothing from the beasts to indicate that they recognised defiance, or feared the fight to come. They simply leered eyelessly at them, waiting to strike on an unknown signal.

“They’re just bones,” Judith hissed back, taking in the sweep of the cavern, forming a strategy. “Nothing more; there’s actually less to fight than if they were blood and sinew. Don’t lose your nerve.”

“My nerve hasn’t gone anywhere. I just want it on record that you never said anything about battling a legion of the damned. This sort of thing costs more.”

“They’re blocking our path to the bridge,” Judith said. “It would seem they know our purpose, so we have to outsmart them.”

“That shouldn’t be a challenge. They have no brains.”

“We fight our way back to the tunnel, and circle around against the left-side wall. Then we’ll rush over the crossing, and see if we can sever it from the far side.”

“Destroy the bridge? How on earth are we supposed to get back then?”

Judith shot him an uncertain glance. “Deal with that problem later?”

“Costs _a lot_ more, Carrots,” Nick growled, spinning his dagger in his paw.

The unknown signal came. The skeletons surged forwards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if you're liking this as much as pirate Nick and navy Judy, but I'm finding this version of the characters a lot of fun to write -- the snark that usually only comes out in Fluff Pieces fits in so comfortably with these two, and its a lot more fun to write. It feels more human, too, than the sort of florid verbosity that gets chucked around in Of Salt and Steel. Both are good. I like this one better.
> 
> But I'm not going to let OSAS die quietly for this novel...er, novel. Promise I'll get back to it.
> 
> By the way, just to anticipate some clarification that might be needed: in Australia there is a saying -- "Cold as a nun's tit." I hear it frequently. The implication being that nun's tits go untouched for pretty much their entire lives; chastity does that. It's got an irreverent ring to it that I like, and more importantly sounds right in Nick's mouth (the comment, that is; not the tit). Devout is just a place-holder until I have written a more specific religion that holds sway in this universe.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	3. Battle in the Darkness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boy, was this one a struggle to get polished. But here it is. Enjoy!

They fell upon Judith and Nick, this battalion of revenants, with every manner of weapon ever wrought from iron or wood or bone, from here to the furthest sands and seas.

Sparks in the darkness. New steel ringing against old.

Judith met the advancing foe with a growl, her blade dancing in her paw with expert grace. The first skeletal warrior to meet her had its arm split in two at the elbow, and its skull punctured shortly after. There was no wheeze of pain, no shriek in defeat; the thing just clattered to the floor, like a bundle of sundried wood. The second met a similar fate, and the third, too. Their deaths, if they could be called such, struck no fear in the others.

Nick was close by, wielding torch and dagger, catching a sword-blow against his blade and stepping forward to plunge his knife into the unwary monster’s forehead. He spotted a blurred shape in the corner of his vision, and ducked under the sweep of a viciously serrated khopesh. He repaid his enemy’s attempt at beheading him with a punishing slash of his dagger. The sword went tumbling away, the skeleton’s severed paw tumbling with it, still death-gripped (appropriately enough) to the weapon’s hilt.

Nick was a betting sort of mammal; it occurred to him that he’d improve his odds with two knives drawn.

Another enemy approached -- some tall, loping ungulate in a strange, conical helm, the tattered and greasy remnants of a cloak flapping from its shoulders. It swung at Nick with a monstrous double-pawed club, crowned with foot-long spikes. But it swung slow and laboriously, and Nick stepped around the swipe and plunged his flaming torch into the skeleton’s empty ribcage. The torchhead became snared in the ancient fabric of the creature’s cloak, and a moment later the whole beast was encased in flames, its bones cracking and charring in the heat.

With that paw free, Nick drew his second dagger, flashing a taunting grin.

“Try me, you failed warriors,” he snarled.

Two of them responded, rust-blunted swords rushing at Nick’s face. He caught one overhead swing with his dagger’s guard, trapping it fast, and the other he deftly parried away. Then he stepped neatly past both of them, and with a brutal pinwheel he took their arms off at the shoulders. In the same fluid motion, he rammed both blades into the backs of their skulls, smashing them like dropped china.

Meanwhile, Judith was making steady, embattled progress back towards the cavern’s wall.

“Nick!” she called, then grunted as she sidestepped a swing from an axe which smacked instead against the slate ground, throwing a shower of sparks. She hacked the axe’s head from the haft and skewered her sword straight through the enemy’s rotten wooden shield, splintering the arm behind it. “Fall back to the wall! Don’t get caught up in them!”

He threw her a glance, but in that momentary distraction a skeletal ram, wearing a suit of armour that was crumbling to rust, rushed forward and slammed into Nick with its heater shield, bowling him over. He landed sprawling on his back, and barely had time to gasp as the enemy’s spear came hurtling towards his head.

Suddenly, the speartip flashed bright blue and rushed towards the earth, as if magnetised, staking hard into the ground. Nick found purchase on the floor with his feet and lashed forward, running his dagger through the knight’s tarnished visor. His bladepoint sunk in with a tortured squeak, metal biting through metal. He shot a second look at Judith, who had her magic stone in paw.

“Come on!” she shouted again, and Nick sheathed his blades and grabbed his opponent’s spear, shaking it out of its doubly-lifeless paws. He brought the spear behind his shoulder and, with a brutal double-pawed swipe, he cut a swathe through three approaching foes, splitting their spines in half. Ruination wrought, he dropped the spear and rushed towards Judith, daggers in paws again.

“If you get injured Nick, you’ll be beyond my help; I can’t fight this horde and care for the wounded all at once!” Judith barked, as they continued to back their way towards the cavern’s wall.

“Watch it!” Nick growled back, stepping past her to engage some leatherclad warrior which dived off a boulder, curved daggers in both its paws. Nick dropped low, and brought his dagger through the enemy’s brittle shin, smashing it in two. The assassin landed clumsily on its ruined legs, skating along the ground; it hadn’t even come to a rest before Judith severed its head with a vicious backswing.

The pair came to the steep rise of the wall and began to trace a path towards the chasm. There was cover up ahead, as well; some time in the distant past, one of the towering stalactites hanging from the ceiling had broken free and crashed to the earth, where it had come to rest tilting against the wall, forming a natural archway.

“Through there!” Judith called, scampering ahead. “We can try to lose them behind us.”

She stopped, however, when some cadaverous archer appeared on top of the fallen column, an arrow already nocked, bowstring already taut. She skidded to a halt and readied to dodge the incoming missile.

This proved unnecessary; from behind her, something swept through the air, hissing like a viper, before lodging itself between the archer’s eyes. The enemy toppled sideways, arrows sliding from its quiver to clatter on the stones.

Judith spun to see Nick advancing past her. He had one free pouch on his chest where a throwing dagger had once been.

“If you get injured, Carrots…” he rebuked, and Judith felt an idiotic swell of anger. She needed his help, but she didn’t want to owe him her life.

They rushed towards the collapsed column, Nick in the lead, Judith casting the torchlight from behind. As they approached the archway, a pair of skeletons in gourd-leather tunics emerged into the fringe of red firelight, broadswords raised.

Nick didn’t stop moving. He summoned a burst of speed and ran partway up the inside of the arch and vaulted the nearest enemy’s shoulder in a single bound. He caught the warrior’s wrist with one paw and wrenched it sideways, putting the sword through the other skeleton’s temple. His first foe spun to face him, but Nick leered into its bony countenance and thrust his paw forward, plugging his fingers into the enemy’s vacant eyes and nostrils. Then, with a sharp tug, he yanked the enemy’s skull clean off.

It seemed that being headless didn’t pose quite the same inconvenience to the dead as it did the living, for the un-skulled creature stood dumbly for a second before it raised its sword again, determined to carry on the fight. Judith was quick to deal with that; rushing in from behind, she hit the beast on the back so hard that its ribcage erupted, its bones smashing to white splinters on the ground.

For his part, Nick spun around to face a third opponent who had come scurrying in from the shadows, a wicked-looking zaghnol in paw. Nick smashed the skull he held against this enemy’s, the one in his paw cracking to eggshells, the other denting in a spiderweb of cracks. Nick then grabbed the haft of the enemy’s zaghnol and, with a little hop, he swung through the enemy’s legs, pulling the haft with him. His enemy was yanked down headfirst, smacking into the ground with enough force to burst him to pieces.

Judith quickly caught Nick up, offering a paw to lift him off the ground.

“You’re going to get yourself killed, acting like that!” she hissed, promising herself that she’d never admit to him how impressive he had just been.

“Glad you’re worried about me,” he said, but was cut off when something whipped past his nose, clattering against the wall.

They spun, and saw a phalanx of archers -- five of them, six of them -- loosing arrows from the far side of the cavern. Around them, more of the undead soldiers were swarming forward, undeterred by the ruined remnants of the warriors Nick and Judith had already dispatched.

“Forsaken gods,” Judith cursed, sheathing her sword and snatching the blue gem from inside her cloak again. When the next salvo of arrows came rushing in they were swatted away like flies around a horse’s tail. Nick was plenty thankful to be safe from the incoming missiles, but with the aid of the torchlight he could tell something was off; Judith was breathing heavily, like a marathon runner on their final leg. Her paws were trembling.

“What on earth’s the matter with you?” he demanded, as they started jogging towards the bridge. “Are you about to have a heart attack or something?”

“Shut up and run” she gasped out, but was startled from her right-side by a hulking feline skeleton lunging out of the darkness, a broad wooden shield in one paw, a heavy spiked mace in the other. Its chainmail hauberk rattled as it moved, clotted with the filth of idle centuries. It raised its mace and angled a blow that would have splattered Judith’s head like an overripe melon.

Nick slunk past though, fast as mercury, and flung himself at the enemy, crashing into it with enough force to knock them both backward, the mace swing touching nothing but air, He brought his dagger down at the skeleton’s head, but his blade missed and sank into the wood of the shield, where it stuck fast.

He released it and landed on the ground with a thud, narrowly avoiding the skeletal tiger’s counter-swing. Without his knife handy, he simply lashed out and smashed the warrior’s knee with a well-placed kick, bringing the enemy down in a noisy pile.

He reached to retrieve his dagger from the shield, but had to quickly pull back as a huge, toothed warhammer came rushing down, smashing the fallen feline’s bones to powder, narrowly missing Nick’s fingers. He rolled away, getting only glimpses of the skeleton -- an enormous yak from the Cold Mountains, barbarically dressed in rotted furs -- who had nearly flattened his paw. He’d barely come to a halt before Judith seized him by the neck and started dragging him away.

“Come on, we’re close to the bridge!” she huffed, letting him go once they were both set on the right course. Nick paused just long enough to fling a second throwing dagger at his hammer-wielding foe, snipping its head off its shoulders, before he turned to pursue her.

Close was correct; they were barely yards from the first slab of stone that made up the bridge. But there were three enemies standing in their way, all dressed in heavy armour, all menacing them with longswords. Heavy shields raised, bearing the sigils of once proud houses whose names were lost to history.

“Sod it, there’s a lot of these bastards!” Nick groaned. “And I’m short one dagger, too…”

He jumped when his knife, along with the shield he’d left it plunged in, came rushing through the air and clattered just in front of his feet; a present from Judith.

“One last time,” she muttered through ragged breath, and she held the glimmering blue stone above her head. To their left, a huge double-pawed battle-axe lying in the dirt began to rise into the air, wobbling as it floated in space.

Then it rushed away, spinning in a deadly pinwheel as it soared towards the assembled foes.

They didn’t stand a chance; they weren’t so much cut in half as they were demolished, their armour erupting into fragments, their bones following suit, leaving behind just a trio of paired legs.

Judith quickly stuffed the gem away -- she daren’t try to use it again, not so soon -- and shot Nick a glance through bloodshot eyes.

“Well?”

Nick sheathed his recovered dagger and scooped up the wooden shield.

“Let’s go.”

With the aid of torchlight to check her steps, Judith took the first leap, landing on the stone slab. It wobbled slightly under her weight, but held steady enough. Nick quickly followed, taking a moment to reel at the yawning black maw that beckoned beneath them. If they fell, it would swallow them and never spit them back out.

An arrow bounced off the ground near his foot, drawing him back to more immediate threats, and he spun so he was moving backwards, blocking the incoming missiles with his shield and praying he didn’t move too far and tumble over the edge.

Bit by bit, they scrambled from platform to platform, sometimes taking leaps over dizzying nothingness to do so. By the time they’d nearly crossed to the opposite side, Nick’s borrowed shield was pincushioned with arrows, very nearly battered to pieces. He tossed it over the edge, sending it spinning into the empty black.

“Get your gem ready, Carrots!” he cried, as he jumped to join her on the penultimate platform. “That’s the only way we’re going to be able to sever those roots!”

Judith spared a single final glance behind them. At least five skeletons were in the process of rushing across the bridge as well.

“Alright, let’s do this,” she said, and turned to face the final jump.

But their final jump didn’t come.

She and Nick stood transfixed, pined in place by fearful amazement as something on the other side began to stir.

Something huge.

Judith saw the crown of a vast bull’s skull, easily three-feet broad, flanked with long, curling horns. A pair of purple fires burned from the caverns of its eye sockets. This terrifying head rested atop a gargantuan body that rose to its full height -- easily three-times Nick’s -- with slow menace. Its bones were stencilled with eldritch symbols, purple and burning bright with arcane sorcery. Clay and gravedirt clotted its ribs.

It carried an axe of absurd proportions; Nick would have wagered it was large and heavy enough to rupture a castle gate, if he’d cared to take bets at that moment and wasn’t so terrified that he couldn’t remember the value of gold.

“A…bone giant…” Judith gasped. She had heard stories of these, too.

The growing number of pursuers were reaching dangerously close to them now, and would shortly seize them by the scruffs of their necks and run them through, tossing their corpses into the void.

But Nick and Judith didn’t notice. And neither did the bone giant.

With indescribable strength, the colossus lifted its giant axe aloft and brought it down on the cliff’s edge with devastating force. It cut a deep cleft in the iron-hard stone, and turned the platform, and the roots, into dust and shards.

Nick came to his senses just quickly enough to grab a root near to him, and to reach out and catch Judith by the wrist, before the ground gave way beneath them, and his stomach did a horrible summersault as he suddenly became weightless.

Behind them, the skeletons had nothing like the same reflexes, and they plunged into open air without the faintest sound of complaint, their bodies spinning and vanishing into the infinite depths.

The whole bridge finally came to a clamorous rest against the side of the chasm, and all that surrendered mass came rushing back, making Nick grit his teeth as Judith’s weight pulled on his arm. His fingers, entwined in the roots above him, were already starting to go numb. The bone giant watched them silently from the other side -- perhaps it enjoyed their now inevitable demise, or watched with a statue’s disregard for things. Nick couldn’t imagine which would be worse.

Judith looked up at him, her face part-lit by the torch in her other hand. No, wait…she was looking past his shoulder.

“Nick!” she called.

He threw a strained look above him.

Four of them. Standing on the ledge. Bows in paws. Arrows coming to nock.

“Dammit!” he cursed, looking back down at her in despair. This, it seemed, was how they would meet their ends. He felt a sting of irritation that he was going to die on the clock. He’d never thought anyone else’s problems were worth losing his life over.

“Nick, let go!” Judith shouted at him, wriggling her paw to try and break free of his grasp.

“I’m not going to die as paste at the bottom of a forgotten mountain!” he shouted. He shot a look above him again. Bowstrings drawn.

“Nick! Trust me!”

He looked down again. Her face was loaded with such palpable determination that he felt his fur ruffle.

Nick was not in the trusting business. Trust was what you settled for when you couldn’t buy or cheat your way to certainty. It was a sure bet to get yourself killed.

And it was all he had left.

With a gasp of disbelief at what he was about to do, and a split second before a rain of arrows cut them to pieces,  Nick uncurled his fingers from the bridge, and he and Judith plummeted into the bottomless maw below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So much for these being quickly written; the combination of long work days, a general creative apathy and running out of fresh ways to describe skeletons really did me in this time. I cant remember if I'd previously said that battle sequences were easy or fun to write, but this one was neither, somehow; I just sat and stared at the sentences endlessly, wondering what was wrong with them. While smoking endless cigarettes. Drinking endless bourbon, too. And cursing in French.
> 
> There's a very simple heuristic you can use in writing, and that's that a basic and satisfying narrative should comprise of four elements; Action, Reaction, Interaction and Description. If you lean to hard on just one or two for too long, the audience will probably notice and get bored. Something to keep in mind for who are staring at a page of words, trying to figure out if there's anything amiss. It's what kept me editing and re-editing endlessly for the past few days, but I'm much happier with the final result.


	4. Deep Breath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rude to leave the reader on a cliff-hanger too long...or...a post-cliff-hanger fall, rather. Enjoy!

Nick turned in the darkness, end over end, his stomach churning with the lightness of freefall, the wind streaming into his face.

It didn’t help, but he screamed all the way down.

“Raaabiiiiiiiiiiiit!”

He could see her falling nearby, spinning just as he was, her arms clutching at nothingness, as if she hoped to get purchase on the air. The torch followed them down, too, buffeting in the rush of the wind, shedding a tail of crimson sparks as it fell. Then, suddenly, the flames guttered out in the breeze, and the torchlight died. The cavern went to perfect blackness. To something more unnerving than the mere absence of light.  Unnaturally dark.

Without even a speck of light, Nick’s vision was blunted; he was nearly as blind as any pair of diurnal eyes. All he could do now was fall, and wonder when, exactly, the unyielding ground would rush up to embrace them.

Except there was a speck, he realised. A blue pixie, a needlepoint of brightness, tracing its way down with them.

Suddenly, it felt as if a pair of paws had seized him by the shoulders, as if a flight of angels had snatched him and were lifting him upwards on feathered wings. He gritted his teeth at the sudden arrest of his downward arc, as his armour and weapons and his body itself turned heavy with gravity.

And then he struck the bottom -- not hard earth, as he expected, but cold water. The merciless algor of an underground lake.

The fall was still hard. His legs broke through first, and they paid the price, turned numb and tingling from the impact. And the cold was almost unbelievable. It seemed to squeeze his heart like a tight fist.

But the shock of the chill was countered by the shock that he had survived. He quickly decided that he didn’t want to drown in place of splattering, and he swam towards the surface, breaking through and taking deep, grateful gasps of air. It was perfectly black; it would have been less dark to pinch your eyes tightly shut. He couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t see the rabbit.

“Carrots?” he called into the dark. There was no response save the vanishing echo of his own voice.

“Carrots!? Judith!?”

Suddenly, something burst out of the water next to him, coughing and spluttering for breath.

Nick turned in the water to face whatever it was, muttering, “You’d better not be a skeleton that survived the fall…”

“What skeleton could you imagine takes deep breaths, you softwit?” Judith shot back. A second later she plucked her blue gem out, illuminating herself in the stone’s meagre glow. It was just bright enough for Nick to see that Judith looked utterly depleted. There were reasons beyond just a dive underwater for why her chest was heaving so raggedly.

 “Are you alright, Carrots?” he asked. “I’ve seen better health in those with pelt-pox.”

She didn’t answer him. Didn’t bother to lie. Instead, she thrust her gem above her, casting its light as far as she was able. It didn’t reveal much; slick black stone on either side, worn glass-smooth by the water’s constant passage. It did make it clear to them, however, that there was a current, and that they were being carried away in it.

“Where do you think this goes?” asked Judith, her voice thin with exhaustion.

“Try not to speak; you need to rest a moment,” Nick replied. “So long as it doesn’t end in a waterfall, it hardly matters…”

He trailed off when he noticed that the river’s path, while not taking them over a cliff’s edge, was sweeping them to something just as distressing.

Their path terminated at an impassable cliffside where the walls of the gorge converged. Here, it seemed, the current disappeared underground.

The river hadn’t come to an end, but their air was about to.

Nick spun to face Judith.

“You need to keep calm, alright? Do you hear me? Slow your heart. Before we go under, you take as deep a breath as you’re able. Don’t swim; let the current carry you. And for gods’ sake, don’t you let go of that stone.”

Judith nodded, and watched with trepidation as the rock-wall approached.

Nick fought to stay collected; he was not a fan of swimming, at all. Drowning in water, falling from heights -- these were enemies that could not be fought, not in the manner he was accustomed to. No one bested gravity in a knife-fight.

The wall closed in on them, and Nick locked eyes with Judith.

“Three…two…one…”

They both took deep breaths, lungs bulging, and then slipped back into the icy depths.

Immediately, Nick raised an arm and traced his claws along the underground tunnel’s roof, but he found no gap, no pocket of air to be their saviour. There was nothing under here, besides the two of them, a weak blue light, and endless water.

Judith kept her eyes on Nick, her cheeks swollen with sequestered air, a tiny stream of bubbles coming out. She’d had to hold her breath before, of course, but never under such unnerving circumstances, with the promise of death so bold and obvious, should she and Nick find no source of air soon.

She was acutely aware of each slow, painful second passing; she measured them against the drum of her heartbeat, against the pulse of blood in her ears. She tried to imagine away the fire that was beginning to build in her chest.

The thin stream of bubbles from Judith began to turn fat.

Nick simply watched her, unpanicked; fear was unhelpful, and he couldn’t afford it now. He tried to will Judith to feel the same way, but he could see a desperate terror begin to flare in her eyes.

Then, a glimmer of something caught Nick’s attention, and he looked up. There, somewhere above them, somewhere close and growing closer, was a purple light. It might have been more resurrected monstrosities, waiting to gut them and usher them into the ranks of the unliving. But it might be their next breath, too.

Nick turned back to get Judith’s attention, to point out their salvation and guide her towards it.

He saw her floating limply, the muscles in her face relaxed. No hint of an air bubble from her. The necklace her gem hung from was coiled around her unmoving fingers.

Although his own lungs were begging for mercy, he started swimming towards her; if he surfaced first, there was no telling if he’d be able to get back to her before the current dragged her off. He reached her and seized her by the wrist, and then began to struggle towards the surface again, kicking as hard as he could manage. His throat was burning, laced with bile. His vision began to distort, shaking and shifting like light in the fog.

And then his muzzle went through the water to the cold cavern air beyond, and drunk greedily. The finest wine from Honeyheath was vinegar compared to a lungful of air after a long-held breath.

They had floated to an underground cave, a sort of natural amphitheatre, with a sloping beach of black shale stones. Running through its roof and walls were odd purple veins, the source of the mysterious light.

Perhaps they were seams of magic-infused ore, or some other wonder long gone from living memory. Nick had no time for them right now.

He hauled Judith up to his chest, getting her head out of the water and into the air, and then began to swim sideways for the dry ground. She was perfectly still against him; he couldn’t detect the slightest rise or fall of her breast.

Nick slumped against the black stones, and quickly scrambled to his feet, taking Judith by the collar and dragging her out of the waters. He hauled her as far as was necessary, away from the river’s chill, and laid her down flat on her back. Her paw fell open, the gem casting its diffuse glow over her face. She had the look of one taken by the deepest slumber.

Working as swiftly as he could with his cold-numbed paws, he unbuckled the straps that held her chest-plate on, tossing it aside with a metallic clatter. So too the chainmail hauberk she wore underneath, and the saturated purple cloak; he left her cotton tunic on.

“You’re not going to like this, if you survive,” Nick muttered, and then put his muzzle to hers, exhaling deeply into her, filling her smaller lungs. Then he put both his paws against her chest and brought his weight down, pushing hard, trying to stuff her escaped life back in.

On the sixth compression, her eyes bulged open, wide as saucers, and she brought up a great heave of water, turning to the side to splutter and cough her lungs clear, strings of saliva anchoring her to the stony ground.

“Oh, charming,” Nick muttered, getting to his feet. “But it’s nice that you’re alive. I don’t have a firm grip on how this all works; if you die with lungs full of water, do you pop straight back on your feet, with an uncontrollable lust for murder? Or does that only come once you’ve been dead long enough to rot?”

She looked at him wildly. “I…was I…?”

“Dead?” Nick finished, crossing his arms. “Who knows. Death and sleep sometimes look nearly identical. But you weren’t moving, and you didn’t shriek and scramble away when I put my mouth on yours; I’d say you were close enough to death to reach out and touch it.”

Judith wiped her lips with her paw and looked at her discarded bits of armour.

“Well, I know you said you’d rather die screaming in agony than have my lips anywhere near you, and if that’s still true then you’re welcome to swim back out there and scream until the water spills in. Of course, I won’t be able to hear you, but I’ll trust those screams will be agonised.”

She looked back at him, held his green stare. “Thank you.”

“Spare me the thanks, Cotton-Tail,” he said. “ _Thank you_ is the glass bead of words; it’s worth nothing to me.”

He turned away from her to regard this space they had come to. It had a stark, deadly beauty to it; the purple seams running through the walls filled the space with a deep plum light, bouncing off the surface of the water and the obsidian walls. Interlaced with those amethyst veins were hanging cords of root from the very same from the Deep-Oak they had seen above; roots that had threaded through the bridge that had almost taken them to safety. Nick shouldn’t have felt surprised that those roots ran so deep; they probably sank to the very heart of the world. Stranger things were likely.

“What would be of value is this,” he said, turning back to her. “How about you tell me what this place is. And what about it, exactly, causes the dead such disquiet.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone noted, before I finished this chapter, that rabbits are "obligate nasal breathers", or they favour their noses for breathing (if I had the nerve to be pedantic, Nick should have covered both Judith's mouth and nose with his muzzle; hats off to those who have the patience to write with that level of accuracy). And I've learned other bits an pieces from the fandom, like foxes have magnetoreception, and from my own research; I wrote a Fluff Piece that had Judith bundling ice-packs against her ears, because in real life heatwaves kill rabbits like crazy, and a site recommended cooling their ears with ice-packs. I like importing these things across, but it can be exhausting, and a lot of the time it just makes me nervous about maintaining that level of detail. That said, I'm always keen to learn new animal facts, so feel free to instruct me in the comments if you notice an area I've neglected or glossed over.


	5. Bared

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's chapter 5!

Nick hunched over his open rucksack, fished out one of their few remaining torches and shook the water off of it. That was the fine thing about emberwood sap -- come frost or dew or soaking rain, it could always be trusted to light.

“It’s amaranthite,” said Judith, staring up at the purple web.

Nick looked up at Judith as he rummaged for his flint.

“What?”

“Amaranthite. This violet mineral sunk into the walls.”

Nick glanced back up at the entrancing phenomenon. “Eternal steel, huh?”

It was the stuff of legends -- a purple-tinted metal that could be fashioned into unbreakable plate, or unbendable helms, or a sword that would never need sharpening. An amaranthite blade could cut through a shield, and the arm behind it, and then split the torso the arm was attached to, and end up imbedded halfway through the next enemy.  In the old stories, true heroes used amaranthite swords to lop the heads off monstrous hydras, or amaranthite hammers to turn the strongholds of scheming villains into piles of loose rubble.

In stories.

“Well,” Nick muttered, finding his flint and sparking it against the torch, bringing it to blazing life, “I’ve seen magic trinkets and Deep-Oaks and the risen dead today. What of one more fairy-tale coming to life?”

The torchfire was not going to keep them warm; for all its other benefits, emberwood sap did not burn hot. This was a shame, for the cavern’s cool air was no comfort to two mammals drenched through to the skin. But it was their best alternative. What else was to be done? Tear down and burn the granite-hard roots of the Deep-Oak? They’d have better luck burning the wet shale.

The torchlight was bright, though, and now they could see, in far greater detail, this strange place they had come to.

The cave was spacious; nothing like the yawning cavern in which they had fought with the undead, but expansive enough to ward away claustrophobia. The fire’s glare also revealed some strange, oily, blue-green algae that carpeted the rocks thrusting out of the passing water. It shone brightly under the torchlight, as if desperate for attention. Nick decided it was best to steer clear of the stuff. After what he had seen today, he wouldn’t be surprised to find that merely touching it would melt his fingers and turn his flesh to rot, or something equally horrifying.

And then, most encouraging of all, the torch showed a pathway running adjacent to the river, disappearing into the shadows. With any luck, it would lead them out of here.

“Worth much, this magic metal of yours?” Nick asked, standing up and pulling off one of his gloves. He tipped it upside-down, and a miserable stream of water trickled out.

“It’s legendary, Nick,” Judith said. “It’s probably worth a king’s ransom. Two kings. However many kings there are.” A shiver wracked her body, and she shuffled closer to the torch, which Nick had simply let lie on the ground -- an impoverished facsimile of a real campfire.

“Interesting,” muttered Nick, unbuckling the straps of his leather armour. “Shouldn’t we break a few shards of it free, so if we do escape this place in one piece we’ll have something to show for it?”

“I’m not sure how you propose to break off a shard of unbreakable steel. No fox is that cunning. And what are you doing?”

Nick had removed his gourd-leather armour, and he dumped it unceremoniously in a pile at his feet. He spread his cloak across the ground to let the air at it.

“It’s all completely sodden,” Nick complained, kicking his boots off as well. “And besides, we seem to be safe for now. There’s nothing stirring down here except for you and me.”

“You’re awfully sure of that. How do you know a legion of those shambling beasts isn’t about to coming pouring in after us?”

“I’ll hear them coming. I’ve got keen ears.”

“Only half as keen as mine.”

“But I’ve shed all my armour, Hippity-Hop. I’ll be twice as fast at running away.” As he said that, he yanked his black tunic over his head, bearing his red-furred torso. Judith scrunched her face up, and that quickly progressed to something nearer to alarm when he went for the buckle at his belt next.

“H-hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

Nick shot her a caustic grin. “Don’t flatter yourself, Carrots. Sitting around in wet clothes is desperately disagreeable, and the quickest way to hypothermia I can imagine. I couldn’t abide crossing swords with the army of the damned, only to be undone by the cold.”

He was now standing in naught but his simple undergarments, his breeches shaken free. These he bunched up tightly, wringing the excess water out and smiling at Judith’s averted gaze. “I suggest you do the same, by the way,” he said, spreading his tunic and leggings over a nearby boulder, the better to dry them out. “You’re going to want halfway-dried clothes ready for you when we start making our way back towards the surface.”

Judith stared at him, mortified; the prospect of revealing even an inch of her bare fur seemed to frighten her more than any skeletal horror born out of the mountain’s black womb.

“I...no. I’m fine, thank you. I’m not cold. And I don’t need any rest. We need to keep moving…”

“Do I look a fool to you?” Nick asked, paws on his hips.

“Yes.”

“You’re only fooling yourself, Carrots. I saw what happened up there. You’ve burned yourself down to almost nothing, and it’s because of that magic gem around your neck.” He levelled a finger at her, and she self-consciously put a protective paw over the cowl of her cloak, over the stone underneath. “Every time you summon its power, it taxes you, doesn’t it? What a fine weapon that is; you can push and pull and hurl objects around a room, but soon enough you’re lying on the floor, fighting for breath? Now _that’s_ the sort of power one would envy. No wonder you want all these Teeth so badly.”

“You don’t know anything about it! Shut up!” she spat. But her own anger shrank back when Nick’s began to rear its head.

“And she calls me the fool,” he hissed, looking away into the darkness. “Maybe I know nothing about your damned spells and tricks, but I do know that you’re hardly fit to stand. We need to rest here for a few hours at the least, and if you rest in your wet clothes you’re just as likely to wake shaking and half-dead. Then I’ll have to drag you out of this wretched place without your prize, and then you’ll probably die frozen on the mountainside, anyway; that is, unless we’re gutted by undead monsters before we can flee.” He brought his steely gaze back to her, his mouth a hard line. “I won’t have it; your pride isn’t going to be my death. Undress.”

“No,” Judith muttered.

“What are you thinking, huh?!” Nick exploded, his shouts echoing off the cavern walls. Judith pulled back, like a finger wandering too close to a candle’s flame. “Do you think I’ll get some sick pleasure out of seeing you near naked?! Is that it?! You’re a rabbit, in case you’d forgotten! You couldn’t be less appealing to me if you were a corpse gone to rot! I’d sooner lie with one of those fleshless monsters!”

Judith was still. She wouldn’t meet his stare.

“What is this, rabbit? What are you doing in this place? Is this some sacred duty, huh? Some divine quest, like the ones kittens read of in books? The Quest to the Place of Extreme Unpleasantness? Well, whatever you think it to be, you paid me to take part and to leverage my advice, not to have someone along for you to level your self-righteousness at. Again -- and in short this time, so you can keep up -- if you stay in those clothes, you’ll die. Alright? Now, spare me your overinflated sense of integrity and strip.”

For a moment, there was silence; nothing but the almost-tranquil bubbling of the river coursing by. Then Judith slowly got to her feet -- still, her eyes stared off into the dark, away from Nick’s own piercing green stare -- and began to unclasp the buckle of her breeches with shaking, fumbling paws. Shortly, they slid down her legs and landed with a sodden _thud_ on the ground, leaving her undergarments and bare legs to Nick’s scrutiny.

“And yet, somehow, I am not overcome with lust,” he snarked, and sat down on the cold shale stones, still regarding her over the crackling torchfire.

Judith didn’t seem to hear him. She turned slightly, her back to him, and drew her tunic over her head.

Nick saw it immediately. He had been about to speak; the words died in his open mouth.

From her waist to the nape of her neck, Judith’s back was a web of damaged flesh. It looked akin to a leafless tree, its snaking boughs spreading from the epicentre at the small of her back up to her shoulders. Some of the fur over the scars had grown back, but only in scant patches, and where it hadn’t returned Nick could clearly see the skin beneath, wrinkled and leathery.

A burn, most likely. Whatever it was, it was amongst the worst he’d ever seen.

He watched silently, jaw hanging, as Judith picked up her shed garments and lay them out as carefully as she could manage on the uneven ground. Then she sat, still facing away, her ears drooping downward.

"Have you ever been to The Scales? The mountains, far to the east?"

“No.”

"Not many have. They're rough. Forbidding. There's a legend that the range is the back of a sleeping dragon, turned to stone by the magic of long slumber, and that treading upon it will rouse the beast. That's just a legend, of course. The real reason so few venture there is because it’s a pathway to nowhere. And it’s forever clouded in grey mist. Who would travel to such a place for no reward, other than the chance to misstep in the fog and plunge over the cliffs?"

Her body tightened, from more than just the cold.

"This is where the village of the Custodians is -- Ror-Shala. It’s where the Custodians have kept watch over the Teeth for centuries, making sure their power doesn’t fall into the wrong paws. It’s my home…it _was_ my home.”

“It’s not anymore?”

“Someone found us out. Learned how to navigate the mists. Came to our gate with swords and fire; with a whole damned army.” She did well to hide the shiver that ran through her, to keep the tears out of her eyes. “They wanted the Teeth. And they were prepared to destroy us entirely to get them. They set fire to our huts and temples. They…they killed everyone. Bucks and does. Kittens. But they needed our elder, Ninra, to hunt out their treasure, so they bound me and dragged me before the enemy commander. A fox.”

Nick could see a tremble begin to run down her spine. Rage; not the cold.

“He demanded I tell him where she could be found, and then that he’d be keeping score of how often he disliked my answers.”

She turned her head slightly, so Nick could see her face in the light.

“One.” She touched a paw to one of the jagged scars on her cheek.

“Two.” The next.

“Three. And then, Ninra emerged from the forest and demanded the fox stop. Said she would turn over the stones, so long as no one else suffered. She had them all there in her paw, all these different colours, glowing brightly, even in the daylight. And then, just before the fox could snatch them away, she threw them to the air, and they took flight. Vanished from view. It was the only way she could keep them safe. And then the fox…he killed her. Cut her down...”

She began to sob. She’d never told the story before. She’d been able to keep it at a distance for some time now; to pretend it was a fiction, a tale that happened to someone else. Now she made it real again, conjuring up the faces of her family and all those she’d ever loved. Nick simply sat and listened to her weep. If he felt sorrow for her plight, it was camouflaged behind an emotionally austere mask.

When she managed to reign her tears in, Nick said, “Did he do that to your back?”

“After he slaughtered our elder, he came back over to me. Said the chance to save my life had been spent, and poorly. Then he picked me up and tossed me through the door of a house that his soldiers had already set ablaze. They barred the door. When I realised there was no way I could escape, I took cover under a table. Eventually the smoke grew too thick, and I passed out. When I awoke, the whole building had collapsed around me, all turned to ash and ruin. I burned, just not to death; I guess the flames snuffed themselves out before I was consumed whole. It's been a year since that horrible day.”

“And now you want…what? Revenge?”

“I want our stones back. I want my kin to rest in peace, knowing that right was done by them. And if, along the way, I happen to find the bastard who marched his army to our gates and gave me these scars, then I will cut him down to my size, and then half again, until there’s nothing left.”

“You said he was a fox. Is that all you know about him?”

“His minions all bore the same crest on their armour and shields; a fox’s claw, with three trailing slash-marks. I have that. And I have a name. Grey. Lord Grey.”

Quiet reigned in the cavern as Judith contemplated her past, and Nick looked at the map of misery written on her back.

“We need to sleep,” he finally said, and lay down on his side, facing away from Judith. She looked at him for a moment, and then followed his example, resting her head against the cold stone floor. It wasn’t long before her haunting exhaustion finally bested her, and she fell into a deep, and mercifully dreamless, sleep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Namedrop! That is, both the title and the villain. Sorry if you're a Gideon fan; Lord Grey is not going to be baking any pies in this fic...
> 
> So, just in case you're wondering why I went so far as to scarify our favourite rabbit; well, I've always had a place in my heart for heroes who aren't physically perfect. I like mine to be a bit on the ugly side, and prominent scaring does just the trick. It's a vulnerability and a mark of determination all at once. Or maybe I'm just a sadist...
> 
> Thanks, and keep an eye on Chapter 1 for the coming cover art - I've also got some things planned for when Fluff Pieces hits 1000 views, and likewise for Fox's Guile's 3000th hit.


	6. The Right Price

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm off on holiday soon, so this might be the last update for a short while. Enjoy!

Judith woke back into this strange underworld where there was no sun or stars to mark the progress of the hour, where time seemed wholly untethered from meaning. She lay on her back, peering at the impenetrable rock above her, trying to imagine the glittering daybreak that might be taking place somewhere high above them. The only assurance she really felt that time had not come to a standstill was that the torch had nearly burned itself out, the shadows growing ever stronger against its soft, dwindling light.

She had also not been hungry when she had fallen asleep, and now her stomach growled like an angered bear.

In the wan firelight, she could see Nick a short distance away, his bare chest rising and falling rhythmically, still in the throes of deep slumber.

Grateful for the momentary peace and privacy, she went and checked her clothes. They were damp, but not saturated, and she pulled her tunic over her head, grimacing as the cold fabric clung to her. She was relieved, however; she hated exposing her scars, and it felt good to bury them out of sight again. She pulled her breeches on next and buckled them in place. The wet fabric was uncomfortable, but Nick had been right; she would not have slept soundly if she had kept her sodden garments on. And he was also right that she had needed the rest to recover, curse him.

She turned, and sucked in a startled breath when she saw him resting on one elbow, watching her with a languorous grin.

“What are you looking at, you creep?” she hissed as she picked up her breast-plate and busied herself with buckling its straps. “I thought you said you weren’t interested in rabbits.”

“Rabbits are, by and large, not interesting,” Nick admitted, sitting up straight. “But you are an interesting rabbit, Carrots. An exception to the rule. The last breathing member of a slaughtered tribe, on the hunt for revenge. It makes for a fascinating story.”

Judith tightened the final strap of her armour rather more aggressively than was necessary, and rounded on the fox. “Well, I’m glad you find the death of my family and my kin interesting,” she snapped, eyes alight with anger. Her prior moment of vulnerability was gone -- she had her armour back on -- and now she could go back to treating Nick for what he was; the means to an end who flapped his mouth too much.

If her ire had any edge to it, it bounced off Nick’s shield of indifference. He shrugged, and said, “A lot of mammals have lost a lot of family. At least you have someone to avenge them upon. My uncle died of the plague; shat himself to death. Who’s going to pay my deficit of justice?”

“What food do we have left?” Judith asked, lashing her last bits of armour in place. “Maybe you can make yourself useful and dig it out, rather than irritating me.”

Nick seemed lukewarm about the prospect of returning to his damp attire, so he padded over to his rucksack in his smallclothes and went rifling through their supplies. He came up with a loaf of bread that was doing an excellent impersonation of a sponge.

“How does wet bread for breakfast sound?”

Judith grimaced and held out her paw, catching the hunk that Nick tore off and tossed through the air to her. There wasn’t much to be recommended about bread dunked in the mountain river; she forced it down, knowing this might be all they’d have for some time.

Nick, on the other paw, didn’t seem to be bothered by the disgusting state of their food, and chewed ravenously as he collected his tunic and pulled it over his head.

“Uwm gort a queshun…” he garbled through his full mouth.

“Nick, you simpleton! Finish eating, _then_ speak, if you absolutely must!”

“I’ve got a question,” he ventured a second time once he’d swallowed, sitting down to don his breeches. “Those beasts we fought in the cavern above…did they seem strange to you?”

“They were walking bones, Nick. Yes, they seemed strange to me.”

“Don’t be churlish,” Nick said, standing up to clasp his belt buckle. “I mean, did you get a close look at them?”

“One or two of them, yes. What was so unusual about them?”

“I saw a kopesh from Azghanor. I saw scimitars and zaghnols from the ancient Jai-Juran Empire. I saw bones that were sand-dried and bones that were peat-stained, some yellow with age and some still pearl white. It was a catalogue of the fallen from battles past, from a year ago to forgotten antiquity. And it was that gem, the thing you’re searching for, that brought them to this one place, wasn’t it?”

It had weighed on Judith’s mind, in the pawful of moments when she hadn’t been dodging death. “Probably,” she muttered.

“You don’t know? Look, Cotton-Tuft, let’s leave the lying and chicanery to me.”

“I’m telling the truth!” Judith growled, and then sighed in resignation. “Look, the Teeth…they _know_ that they are no longer a whole. They can feel one another, can feel the distance come between them. And they yearn to be close.”

“Foxshit,” Nick scoffed. “How do they know?”

“They’re not alive or anything; it’s wrong to think of magic that way. If I drop a coin, it’s not for desire that it rushes towards the ground, is it? It’s something else. There’s a force at work that won’t be denied.”

“Is that how you knew to come to this place? That blue gem of yours is calling to its kin?”

Judith nodded.

“And the skeletons?”

“The stones don’t want to be touched. The anointed -- that’s us Custodians, us rabbits -- can touch them. But others can’t…or shouldn’t, rather. Something awful would happen if they did. If the stones are cast too far apart, they put down…defences. Raise guardians to ward away curious eyes and covetous paws. This Tooth seems to be using the dead as a conduit for its protection.”

Nick found the image of a legion of corpses tunnelling to this point from all corners of the world, from all different crumbling strata of earth, to be rather unnerving. But not quite as unnerving as the next thought he had.

“When you first paid for my assistance, you told me there were eight of these relics,” he said. “One you already have in your possession. We’re dicing with death right now to retrieve the second. What sort of danger will we be facing by the time we reach for the third and fourth?”

“No one hires help for an easy task,” Judith returned. “That’s why you’re getting paid, isn’t it?”

“On that subject, if we get out of here alive, we are absolutely going to renegotiate what this labour is worth. It’s not something I ever thought I’d need to stipulate, but my fees increase substantially where battling supernatural monstrosities is concerned. If we’re going claw-to-claw against that hulking colossus with the axe large enough to serve dinner on…that’s forty gold pieces…”

Judith watched him, her jaw muscles working as though she were trying to crack a nutshell with her teeth,

“…Then what’s next…Maybe a giant spider, with venom that can turn iron into slurry. That’ll be fifty gold. Then a carnivorous ogre, perhaps? A giant with a taste for fox-flesh? Seventy gold. Oh, what did you say before? A black, two-headed dragon? Assuming it’s fire-breathing as well, that’d be at least one-hundred and fifty…”

“Alright!” cried Judith. “You’ve made your point! You’re a rapacious mercenary without a trace of honour!” What gold she did have had been scraped together out of the ashes of her destroyed home, and while she had it in some abundance, she’d already weathered a year outside Ror-Shala and was barely any closer to her ultimate goal. Her coin would peter out eventually. Seething at his unscrupulous nature, she muttered, “You’ll get your share, but it really shouldn’t be your prime concern. We have to get those gems together. We have to make them safe.”

“Why do _I_ have to do anything?” he asked, one eyebrow arched. “You want them for sentimental reasons. I want to sell them for enough gold to swim in. I get the distinct impression that you’d kill me before you’d let that take place, so how is it important to me what that the of these damnable stones is?”

Judith bit her tongue, suddenly cautions to speak. This was one secret she wasn’t sure she wanted the world to know.

“Carrots? How are they important? There’s something you’re not telling…”

“They’re…they’re just valuable to me, alright? And you’re getting paid–”

“You’re an abysmal deceiver. Tell me, or I’m whistling all the way back to town.”

Judith sighed, her nose twitching with uneasiness.

“Look…the stones, when they are near to each other…they project something. Some force, some power, beyond even what you’ve seen today. A force that shields us all from things that are not of this world.”

“What, like those skeletons we put to the sword?” Nick said, unimpressed. “They caused me a fright at first, I’ll allow, but they broke under sharp steel easily enough.”

“They are things of this earth, still. Bones lashed together with magic and made to dance like string puppets. I’m not speaking of skeletons or dryads or other fairy-tale monsters. I mean an evil that lurks formless in the void, that finds no obstacle in time or space. And it will crush the life out of this world and claim the blackened shell if it can, because that is what it does. It’s being kept at bay for the time, scattered though the Teeth are. But if someone who knew what they were doing was to assemble the stones, and if they wished to bring creation to a halt…”

She caught Nick’s eyes, and fell to frustrated silence; he had the look of a kit who’d been told that their tongue would fall out if they told too may lies.

“Maybe you think you have a truth there, Carrots. And maybe I’ll believe it when firmer evidence is put before me. But it will change nothing. You have my services so long as the price is right. No more, no less. And the price is no longer right.”

Judith set her jaw. She didn’t know what she expected from this black-cowled knifemammal, but now she saw clearly that it was folly to imagine he’d ever rise above his own base interests. She snatched up her sheathed blade and clasped it to her belt.

“Fine. We’re done here. Ready your equipment and light a fresh torch. I’ll not spend a moment longer down here than I have to.”

Nick shot her a glib smile and pulled on his gloves and boots, his pauldrons and padded cuirass. Then he snatched their last-but-one torch from his sack, and sparked his flint against it. The lurking shadows fled for cover as a fresh surge of bold yellow light filled the cave.

“Very good,” Judith muttered. “Now are you ready to -- hey!”

Nick tossed her the torch and she clumsily caught it in mid-air, nearly stumbling backwards as she did.

“You be the torch-bearer -- you’re the one who sees demons in the darkness, after all. And besides, I need my paws free for a moment…”

Oblivious to her stare of disbelief, he produced an empty glass vial from his rucksack and splashed through the river’s ankle-deep shallows, stopping before one of the algae-coated rocks. Then he ran his blade across the stone’s surface, scraping free a strip of the turquoise slime and shepherding it through the neck of the bottle. When he had taken sufficient to fill the glass, he stoppered it and turned back to Judith. She was staring at him as if he were a perfect lunatic.

“It might be worth a decent sum,” he explained, giving the vial a shake. “Could be a rare ingredient in some life-saving medicine. Or just colourful sludge. Either way, I’ll find some yokel who’ll part with some coin for it. Maybe a rabbit.”

Evidently, Judith had just discovered the moment where her patience for Nick ran out today, and was dismayed by how close it fell to them waking up. Without another word, lest it tempt him into further conversation, she started to follow the pathway adjacent the wending river, the smirking fox following close behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it took me a little longer than I thought, but Wounded World and Fluff Pieces both have their chapter art up. I'm also going to get in the habit of sprinkling in-chapter pictures in various parts of the story; stuff that's quickly drawn for the most part, so I can get more practice at drawing anthropomorphic animals. Chapter 2: Secrets has one at the end. I'll let you know when and if there are others.
> 
> Oh, and so much for any sense of sensitivity out of Nick. Evidently, being a dick makes him feel better about his own sad, miserable life. One-hundred percent.


	7. The Only Path Left

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good news! Here's chapter 7, and every page of Wounded World has art attached! Enjoy!

Judith peered into the threatening darkness that retreated ever ahead of them, trying desperately to forget the cold chill that wracked her body. They might have dodged death by wringing the water out of their cloaks and garments, but they weren’t close to comfortable. The enemy threat might still be present as well, so she forced herself to remain alert, scanning for a flash of bleached bone or worn steel. Her paw never strayed far from her blade’s grip.

“There’s something I’ve been wondering about,” came Nick’s voice from behind. Her paw tightened, her knuckles flexing.

The rack. The iron maiden. Hot pokers. Anything but another moment of his sarcastic wittering.

“I didn’t pay for conversation; I paid for a bodyguard,” she growled. “Shut your muzzle.”

For a moment Nick complied, and there was blessed silence, excepting the gentle babble of the river they were following.

Then Nick punctured the quiet with his familiar whistling tune. Painfully, deliberately, out of key.

She sighed, her defences worn to dust. “What do you wonder about?”

“I’ll allow you rabbits thought this…Raw-Salsa place was secluded. All tucked away in the mountains and the mist…”

“Roor-Shala,” Judith corrected sharply, her eyebrows furrowed.

“…but you must have suspected that someday a threat to your peaceful lives would rear its head. You fight well enough, but I doubt that it’s skill you earned solely in the year between leaving your home and now. There must have been others in your village who had swords and knew not to hold them by the sharp end. How did you all fail to take up arms against your foe?”

A snarl crossed Judith’s face. “You think we all just bowed down and accepted our slaughter?  You think that of our kind?”

“I wasn’t there, Carrots. You were. Tell me otherwise.”

“We were overwhelmed. It wasn’t ten or twelve foxes, few enough to be chased away. It was a battalion. Fifty foxes, at least.” She seasoned the word ‘fox’ well with bitterness, and intentionally too; in her experience thus far, a fox was a murderous butcher at worst, and a vexing ruffian at best.

“So, you tried to fight them off?”

“Tried. We killed some of their number. Those of us who were Custodians, who wore the purple cloak, knew our swordplay well enough. But there were too few of us to run them off. Not all our kind were warriors. Farmers, woodsmiths, scribes; they didn’t stand a chance against Grey’s blooded soldiers.”

“Rakes and hammers rarely have the advantage against swords. But you were most likely doomed from the start. So large a force? Foxes against rabbits? Of course it was a bloodbath.”

There was the bait, dangling before Judith’s eyes. She bit. “Foxes against rabbits? What, are you saying it’s a miracle for a rabbit to cross blades with a fox and survive?”

“I’m not just saying. It’s a plain fact. Nine times out of ten, the bigger mammal, the fighter with the advantage of brute strength and stamina, will triumph. You small creatures simply aren’t bred to be warriors.”

“Listen to yourself, you red sack of hot air,” Judith shot back, her temper starting to flare. “All skin and bone yourself, and you say all that counts in a fight is muscle. That must make you the worst warrior in all the lands. Do you mean to injure your own reputation?”

Nick flashed his grin. “I was speaking in general, Carrots. I’m a special case.”

“You’re a nut case, is what you are.”

“And what of your elder, this Ninra? She had an arsenal of magical stones at hand, and she didn’t use them to turn these marauders into hot ashes? Why not?”

A fair question for once. Judith tried to calm herself, scratching the back of her head.

“You saw what using the one gem did to me, didn’t you? It burned me up. Broke my fortitude. Well, once we seize this next gem, the tax will be twice as heavy. And twice again when we have the third.”

“Ah. The plot thickens.”

Judith nodded. “Ninra was wise to scatter the gems to the wind, for she knew Grey’s foxes would soon disperse to seek them out. They didn’t anticipate that she would keep one behind. But she didn’t leave me this gem with the intent that I use it as a weapon. Rather, as a compass.”

There was a brief silence while Nick considered something, running his finger along his muzzle.

“How many stones could you bare until using their magic will kill you?”

That thought had been on her mind for some time. She shot Nick a helpless glance.

“I don’t know. There are some answers that aren’t recorded in books. I’d rather not find out.”

While they were speaking, the glassy surface of the river had begun to churn white as it gathered speed, eddying furiously around the speartip rocks that jutted from the water. Somewhere up ahead, hidden behind the tunnel’s intestinal twists and turns, the pair could hear a muted roar, and spied a flickering purple aura.

The source of the noise did not remain a mystery for long; their tunnel finally came to an abrupt halt at an opening in a cliffside, where the river cascaded off the edge and fell into the endless black, thundering as it went. The chasm was massive, easily a hundred feet from one side to the other, but the far wall was visible to both Nick and Judith, care of the cavern’s other striking feature; hanging from its centre, suspended in the clutch of a tangled web of stony roots, was a great pillar of amaranthite, dangling like a giant purple tonsil in the mountain’s gaping maw. It was as tall as a castle tower, and it sent forth a radiant wave of purple light that revealed the jagged features of the cavern’s walls.

Nick took a careful step forward and peered over the rim, watching the waterfall disappear into the shadow-plagued depths. The amaranthite’s shine only went so far.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t let the current carry us too far,” he said, “or we’d be finding out just how deep these mountain caves reach.”

“How are we going to get out of here?” Judith muttered, raising her torch in the gloom. Straight down seemed the only option here, and she had no desire to go any deeper into the mountain’s black depths. Perhaps, if they doubled back, they would spot a pathway they had missed.

“There is an escape,” said Nick, pointing upwards, “but it’s not going to be pleasant. See?”

Following his finger, Judith could see that the cavern ended high above at a ledge. The cave wall was pock-marked with gaps and pawholds that a climber could make use of. But the black stone was slick and treacherous, and her fingertips were still numb from the chill. Judith swallowed.

“Do you think it will lead is back to the Deep-Oak?” she asked, trying to imagine a less perilous solution.

“Maybe not, but staying here certainly won’t. It’s the only path left that will take us to the surface.” He flashed her a toothy grin. “What, are you afraid of heights, Carrots?”

“I’m afraid of _depths_ , you ingrate. Even if my gem would spare our lives from the fall a second time, how on earth could we dream to climb back up? We’d be trapped down there until we starved.”

“There’s an easy way to avoid that; don’t fall. Here, pass me your rope.”

Judith unwound the length of hempen cord she kept at her belt and handed it to Nick, who withdrew a grappling hook with barbed flukes from the surprisingly spacious depths of his rucksack. He threaded the rope through the grapple’s eye, and tied as sure a knot as he knew how.

“It’s most likely to snare where those roots are growing,” he said, pointing to where a knot of them protruded from the cliff face like a nest of petrified serpents, all frozen solid. “But it is a fair distance. We’ll have to climb it in stages.”

“That sounds a poor idea,” Judith objected. “One of us is holding a torch. You’ll need an arm free to throw the rope. What, are we to dangle from the cliff by our spare paws?”

“You’ll have to, princess. There’s no other option. I couldn’t possibly throw it all the way to the top…”

He blinked as Judith stepped forwards and snatched the grapple out of his paw, leaving him with just the coiled rope. “Keep a tight hold on that, would you?” she said, and then slipped her paw under her cowl for her blue stone. Once she had it, she tossed the grapple into the air, as casually as one might flick a coin. Then the gem in her paw flashed, and the grapple suddenly rocketed off towards the ledge above them, the rope snapping like a whip as it went. It travelled in a graceful arc before landing with an echoing _clack_ amidst a prominent bunch of Deep-Oak roots, where its flukes became caught and held tight. On the other end, Nick gave the rope a testing yank, and was satisfied that the grapple wouldn’t budge when it bore their weight.

“You’re not going to faint now, are you?” he said as Judith tucked the stone away.

“Don’t worry about me,” she grumbled, though he had a point. She was still poorly rested; overusing its power now would be a mistake.

“Here,” Nick said, handing her the other end of their rope. “Tie it to your belt. And knot it well; if we do slip, that’s all that will save you.” As he spoke, he took a section of rope a few yards along and tied a loop into it, then used that to secure himself by his own belt.

“For the first time, Nick, I might just heed your advice; don’t fall,” Judith said, but doing as she was told. Once they were both satisfied that the knots would survive a fall if it came, Nick took the torch from Judith -- he was a practiced climber, and had the better chance of doing so one-pawed -- and gave her a nod.

Then both of them stepped from the edge of the cave’s mouth, and swung out over the treacherous deep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The pictures definitely aren't necessary; I always feel cheated when authors take the easy escape and just print a diagram or example of what one should be able to describe just in words. But that's usually for things like the layout of a room, or the sigil of a fantasy house. The images here are only ever of something that has a literary description as well. Or they don't even capture a direct scene from the chapter, so much as the idea, the essence, of that part of the story. They're also good reminders that I'm trying to maintain a slightly silly, jocular feel.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Wounded World is picking up popularity fast, and will soon be matching hits with both stories from Of Salt and Steel, which I'm taking as a sign that people are interested. In that case, it's time to start planning for this tale long term...


	8. Balance

They landed feet first against the cliff, as gracefully as a rabbit and fox roped together could hope to.

Clumsy as they were, Nick kept a tight hold on the torch, and neither of them knocked themselves unconscious on the steel-hard cliff surface. Once they had steadied, and were certain that the rope would bear their weight, Nick glanced over his shoulder to give Judith a grin. His glass-green eyes flashed in shadows thrown over his face by the torchlight.

“Remember, Carrots; one paw at a time, and don’t look down.”

“You’re looking down right now, you buffoon,” she returned.

“I’m a special case, remember?”

Carefully, but without delay, the two began to scale the cliff face.

Judith kept herself pressed tightly against the wall, keeping her vision fixed on Nick’s tail and following his direction, selecting the same holds that he was willing to trust. It was no easy task; the absence of tactile sensation through her boot-tip made her feel desperately uncoordinated, and whatever feeling the cold had not stolen from her fingers was chased away by the weight she now hung on them. But Nick seemed to be managing the task without difficulty or complaint, and with the added complication of sparing one paw to keep the torch aloft. She refused to let him think her cowardly, so she swallowed her fear and focused on where her paws were going.

Halfway up their climb, the availability of decent pawholds started to lead them to the left side of the cliff, and the slack rope between them and the grapple began to bow. A surge of panic suddenly roiled through Judith as she wondered just how well Nick could see the path ahead; if they ran out of faith-worthy ledges they would have to backtrack, and Judith wasn’t confident she could do that without slipping off the rocks.

“Nick! Is there a clear way to the top? We’re not going to get trapped, are we?”

“Have a shred of faith, would you? I know you’re getting distracted down there, staring up at my luscious tail, but I’m going to have to insist-”

He had turned his head to team the insult with a provocative smirk, but he froze when he saw the stark terror in her eyes. She wasn’t looking at him, but past him -- to something on the ledge above them.

He brought his gaze to the clifftop again, and saw two skeletons, both of them wolves wearing leather jerkins that had long rotted to little more than scraps. Both of them had tall yew bows that they were nocking arrows to. Worse still, there was a ferret, wiry even by the standards of a skeleton, hunched over their grapple, a curved dagger in its scrawny paw. It was clear it intended to sever the rope and send both Nick and Judith plummeting to their deaths; that is, unless the pair of archers riddled them with rusting arrows first.

Nick knew he only had a second to act; less, even, as he heard the creak of tightening bowtwine. He grasped the rope with his spare paw-- Gods, he prayed he was strong enough to do this with one arm -- and called to Judith, “Hang on!” Then he kicked them both away from the wall.

They sailed from the cliffside, legs thrashing over the pit’s fathomless gullet. The two arrows missed them, bouncing off the spot where they had been a split moment ago. They swung to the right, both too terrified to scream, their trajectory taking them up to a broad cluster of roots that protruded from the rocks. As soon as they reached the apex of their swing, Nick jammed his feet between the roots and the wall adjacent, relinquishing the rope and grabbing for whatever pawhold would take his weight.

Below him, Judith latched onto the roots so forcefully that she heard her knuckles pop, adrenaline gifting her a grip tighter than a turned screw.

A brief moment later Nick saw the other end of their rope, sheered away from the grapple, go fluttering into the open air like a destitute knight’s pennon, until it came to rest dangling forlornly below them. Now there was nothing but their own strength saving them from a certain rendezvous with the pulverising ground far, far below.

Fortunately, the bundle of roots that Nick was pushing his weight against also served as a barrier, obscuring them from the archers’ sight. But it was far from perfect, and he pulled his fingers back as a stinging shaft clipped the roots mere inches from his fingers. They were keen shots, for creatures whose eyes had decayed in some century long passed. If Judith and he dared to expose themselves, the bowmammals would put arrows right between their eyes. And if they stayed, their strength would eventually fail them, and they would slide and fall into oblivion.

 _Shit of the gods,_ Nick thought in dismay. _I have no idea what to do._

Beneath him, hanging by her paws and desperately trying to find purchase with her feet on the ice-slick cliff, Judith cried, “Nick! What are going to do?! We can’t stay here!”

“I know that, thanks! I’m thinking!” he shouted back. With his right arm pressed against the wall, he couldn’t wave his torch about for a better view. He tried to peer past the roots, and pulled back as another perfectly aimed shaft whipped by, nearly striking his muzzle and giving him a painful, if amusing, nose piercing.

“Hurry!” Judith called again.

He looked above them, and then he spied it, just a few feet over his head.

Salvation. A hole in the wall.

“Judith! There’s a hole! There’s a gap above me! But…” he craned his neck, trying to get a better look in the torchlight. “It’s very small, much too narrow for me!”

“Where does it lead?!” Judith cried.

“Probably to the ledge! I don’t know; does it really matter?!”

Judith finally managed to get her feet wedged in a narrow crack and stared up at Nick above her. “Alright! I’m coming up!” she called, reaching up and seizing his left ankle.

Nick grunted and dug his heels into the wall twice as hard. “Hell, Carrots! You’re going to drag me down! For someone so small, you weight a damned tonne!”

“It’s the armour!” she shouted hotly.

“Sure it is. And don’t you dare grab my tail, or I’ll kick you off!”

She reached high and latched onto his belt. His eyes went wide as Judith hung all her weight on it, and he felt his breeches begin to slide down.

“Woah, woah! Alright, grab the tail if you like!”

“Shut up and hold on tight! Don’t you dare let yourself slide down!”

She was halfway up his body now, and was able to grasp his shoulder with one paw and his muzzle with the other, making him honk unintelligibly in discomfort. With one last effort, she dragged herself past his face, squashing it with her breastplate, and finally found herself mounted on his shoulders.

Now she could see it; a meagre aperture, barely a foot in width. She stretched as high as she could, getting her fingertips over the ridge of the hole and struggling to heave herself up to it. It was a tight squeeze, even for a mammal of her slight build; too tight, as it turned out. Her head and shoulders made it through before her pauldrons caught in the crushing confines, and she found herself stuck with one arm stretched out before her, the other pinned to her side.

“Nick, I…I’m stuck!” she called out, flushed with embarrassment despite the peril of the moment.

“You’re what?” came the reply from below.

“I’m damned stuck, alright!? You need to give me a push!”

Still pressed for blessed life between the roots and the rockwall, Nick let out a growl of irritation and started shimmying his way up to her, fighting to avoid presenting a target to the enemy sentries. Once he let his tail flick from behind cover, and a well-aimed missile sailed straight through it, clipping out a chunk of his supple orange coat.

“You’ll pay for that!” he roared, flattening his abused tail back against the wall. “Damned if I’m not had it with skeletons for today! I’m going to make chew-toys out of all of them…”

He came level with Judith’s struggling rear end, and permitted himself an amused guffaw. A mistake, of course; with her ears, Judith could hear a louse fart on the other side of a room.

“I hope you find it just as funny when you’re falling to your death, you cut-rate jester!” she chastised, growing redder by the moment. “Get on with it!”

Nick jammed his torch into a recess in the roots, giving himself back a spare paw. Then it occurred to him exactly what was being asked, and he allowed himself a grin of cruel humour.

“Carrots! I’m going to put my paws on your butt!”

Judith ceased kicking, her tail going rigid with abhorrence. “Just do what you have to!”

If his paws were free, he would have rubbed them with glee. His verbal ammunition against the rabbit was accumulating quickly on this adventure: a kiss, a striptease, and now a groping that were all matters of life and death. Bringing up any one of these later would be enough to make her burst with humiliation. It was too rich for words.

“Alright! Here we go! Paws en-route!”

“Oh gods, Nick! Do you want to die for the sake of my prolonged misery?! Hurry up!”

He gave her a sharp slap on the rump and pushed as hard as he could, grunting with the effort. But Judith remained stuck fast, and he achieved nothing more than answering the question of what Judith’s rear end felt like. He doubted she’d see the value in this.

He abandoned using his paw and clambered a little higher until his shoulder was level with her backside.

“Carrots! Incoming!”

He bent forward and, with all the force he could muster, threw his back against her. Judith felt herself budge an inch.

“Yes! You’ve got it!” she cried, wriggling her shoulders in a desperate attempt to assist. “Again!”

Nick threw his weight against her a second time. A third. She skated a little further each time, until her ears protruded from the other side of the hole.

Then Nick summoned all that was left of his strength and courage, and gave a final titanic shove. With an almost comical _pop_ , Judith flew from the other end of the hole, landing on her shoulder and rolling gracefully to her feet. In unison, the trio of skeletal warriors turned to face her, their eyes black pools in the natural wine-purple shimmer of the cave.

“You’ve shown me your finest skills,” she hissed, and drew her glittering sword. “Now let me respond in kind...”

The bowmammal nearest her had already nocked an arrow, and made to put a shaft right through her heart. It never got the chance; Judith rushed in with shocking speed and cut the bow in half, the eons-old wood splintering like dry kindling. Then she lashed out with her foot and swept the monster’s legs from underneath it, sending it crashing over the cliff’s edge.

The furthest archer was drawing its bowstring now, while the slender ferret, brandishing its knife, lunged towards her. The ferret was no protection against the bowmammal behind, she knew; a shaft would pass straight through its empty frame. Instead, she sidestepped the ferret’s furious swipe and gathered up the fabric of her cloak, casting it before her like a fishermammal might a net. It proved sufficient cover, and the wolf’s arrow swept through her cloak, missing her shoulder by a matter of inches.

There was no second shot. She covered the distance between them in a single, nimble bound and put the point of her sword right through the archer’s muzzle, breaking its skull into pieces.

She heard clack of claws on stone behind her and dropped like an anchor, the ferret’s ambushing swing passing just over her eartips. She rolled backwards onto her palms and delivered a punishing double-heeled kick that lifted the diminutive skeleton right off the ground, knocking two of its limbs clean off. The ferret had barely skidded to a halt before she stalked forward and, with a warrior’s scream, a hot-blooded bellow that belonged on the lips of a savage steppes barbarian, she brought her fist down on the mammal’s skull, blasting it to shrapnel and residue. Finally, the cave was quiet again, save for Judith’s wild, visceral breathing.

She wondered how much of that rage had been manufactured by Nick’s paws on her backside.

Calming herself with a sigh, she sheathed her blade and glanced at the ferret’s discarded arm, which was grasping dumbly for the grip of the knife lying nearby. She kicked both dagger and arm over the edge of the cliff, dusting her paws together in triumph.

From his position, still dangling at the narrow tunnel-mouth, Nick gave a congratulatory whoop.

“That was some spectacular bladework, Carrots! Couldn’t have done them in better myself! Here, do me a favour and rescue me.”

He took the trailing rope, which was still tied to his belt, unlashed it with one paw, and then stuffed it through the hole.

“Tie it back on to that grapple, and then weight the other end and toss it to me.”

Judith vanished from sight, and a moment later Nick’s end of the rope went whizzing back through the hole. He waited quietly for her to reappear and whisk him to safety, smiling at their triumph.

And waited. And waited.

And then he became awfully uncomfortable with how long he was waiting.

“Carrots?” he called. “Judith? Are you alright?”

Silence. Nothing but the gentle sizzle of his torch, still plugged into the wall nearby.

“You’re going to let me hang here for a while, aren’t you?”

Even hidden from sight, he swore he could hear the smile on her lips.

“I’d help you sooner, Nick, but you know us rabbits. We’re poor fighters. We need our rest.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One last dose of steel-ringing action before the final show down! Hope you found it fun.
> 
> There's not much to clarify here; one of my ever-vigilant proof-readers pointed out that Judith doesn't always get her own back when the relationship we're talking about is an antagonistic one, so it was nice to make a deposit in the Judith-owns-it fund.
> 
> Remember, you can see other scraps of artwork, along with the various chapter sketches, on Technical-Error's deviant art page. Comment if you enjoyed -- nothing gets me through a demanding work day like having a filling inbox to distract me.


	9. Something Amazingly Heroic

Nick sat with his legs dangling over the precipice, baiting the hungry darkness below.

He was not so much fearful of the fall as annoyed by it; two close calls with being turned into mammalian jam had numbed him to the danger. Now he tempted it with a child’s bravery, knowing he was beyond harm; that the darkness had no power to take wing and seize him.

Behind him, Judith shrugged off her cloak and inspected the damage, a diamond rent in the fabric at her shoulder where the arrow had passed through. It was unsightly, but thankfully unbloodied.

“Well. Perhaps I deserved that,” said Nick, after a rare moment of self-reflection.

“You did,” Judith muttered in return, draping her cloak around her shoulders once more. She’d see that the tear was patched the next time they encountered a township, before it ripped further and descended into ruin.

“I mean, it was only my life that was imperilled. No grave matter.”

“Well, now we understand the state of things,” Judith replied haughtily. “The fate of my kin is hallowed ground; it won’t suffer your japes.”

There was a silence, a moment that Judith felt, had they been two with any chance of a friendly rapport, would have been awkward or sour. It wasn’t so, but she felt compelled to act as if it were. “You thought and moved quick with that swing, by the way. Very quick. You probably saved us both.”

“What’s that -- the third time in a day? Think nothing of it.” He swore he could sense the wrinkle of displeasure that crossed Judith’s face, and it brought a smile to his own. But he pushed it no further; had she not earned some respite from his verbal fusillade, at least for a moment?

Instead, he turned his attention back to the immense amarenthite fang, its light shifting and throbbing as if to the rhythm of some deep planetary heartbeat.

“How much amarenthite would you wager is in this one spike?” he asked.

Judith cocked her head to one side, taking in the sight. “Enough to put enchanted blades in the paws of a hundred soldiers. Enough to give you an army to conquer all things. That is, if you could somehow dig it up. And decrypt the secrets of how to forge it.”

“And avoid getting backstabbed by whatever help I enlisted to the task, at that,” Nick added. Still, he hung to the fancy that one day he could return to this desolate peak and stake a claim to it. Start a thriving trade in a magical metal that most wouldn’t even believe was real.

“We should go, if you’ve found your breath,” Judith said.

Nick nodded, and drew his feet away from the void, leaving the darkness to its domain, to brood over its lack of influence. There were greater dangers to be faced.

“There’s no point in us going claw-to-claw against these bone soldiers; we’ll be shedding blood for no gain. I strongly suggest we slip on past them, you grab this cursed purple gewgaw, and then we scarper before they realise the foxes have raided the henhouse.”

“I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but I agree with you,” Judith said. “We were on the backpaw before; it’s time to move to the fore. There’s just one issue with that -- the bone giant…”

“The big ivory bastard? Giant axe? Overcompensating for something?”

“It’s been brought into being for the sole purpose of ensuring no one lays a finger on the stone -- the engine that powers its life. It’s _not_ just going to let us slip by and steal its treasure.”

While she talked, Nick spooled the rope over his arm, returning it to a neat coil that he could hang from his belt. At Judith’s observation, he grinned and gave the grapple a knowing waggle. “Don’t strain your little bunny brain over that, Carrots. I’ve got a plan.”

“I won’t touch my gem; I’ve spent myself too severely on that.”

“This plan is a little less _tangled_ than your magic malarkey. I’ll explain…”

They started along the only path, which led into the shadows of another cave, towards the only choice that was left to them.

 

\------

 

The nightshade light from the amaranthite eventually dimmed to nothing, but the need to light their final torch did not arise; up ahead, both could see a white crack in the darkness. It proved to be a thin fissure, high inside the moon-dazzled cavern where their adventure had first begun. They squeezed through the gap, and found themselves standing on a ledge jutting out from the cave wall. The great chasm that rent the cave in two was far to their left, and a steep but navigable slope was all that stood between them and the majestic Deep-Oak in the distance. That, and a hundred skeletons waiting to leap into murderous animation.

Their foes lay slumped all about in ivory piles, motionless, like the abandoned playthings of a spoiled brat. Further beyond, Nick spotted a vast jumble of white piled up beside a gargantuan axe; the slumbering bone giant, no doubt. If the colossus landed a single blow against him, he could forget the idea of a funeral; there’d be nothing to bury save a splatter of red and a few pawfuls of bloody fur. But if they moved quickly, if they were surefooted and stormwind swift, there would be nothing to fear.

“How close do you think we can sneak before they wake?” Judith whispered.

Nick opened his mouth to answer, but the chance was stolen from him; from high in the cave’s pitch-black recess, the legless torso of some feline warrior suddenly fell upon him, making him cry out in surprise. It tried to open Nick’s throat with a dagger in one paw while it clutched at the fur on his head with the other.

Judith went for her sword, but before she could intervene, Nick brought up the grapple and hooked its barbs through the feline’s empty eyes. With a heave, he flicked his opponent off his shoulders and sent it rolling down the slope. It bounced and scraped all the way down, like a sea of marbles coursing over cobblestones, each impact echoing loudly in the great dome of the cave.

By the time it slid to a noisome halt at the slope’s base, Judith wore a cringe that bordered on acute agony. Nick merely stared in silent chastisement at the fragmented remains of the foe that had robbed them of their silent entry.

The noise soon followed; the locust-like click of ribs, spines, jointless arm and leg bones scraping together as they assembled. The anthem of the undead army.

“Alright. There goes our element of surprise,” Nick muttered, drawing a dagger in his other paw. “New plan; don’t get your head split open.”

“Remember; we’re going straight for the stone,” Judith said, her sword adding a menacing soprano ring to the cacophony as it left its sheath. Then they both leaped off the cliff.

They landed spider-like on the slanting stone, paws and feet skating on the slippery rock as they rushed to the cave’s base. Judith could see nearly-assembled archers taking their positions in the distance, and knew in no time she and Nick would be ducking under an iron rain of bodkin points. Worse still, there was an entourage of warriors waiting for them below, the tips of cutlasses and broadswords and rapiers all thrust in their direction with murderous intent.

The first skeleton to lunge forward was rudely shocked (or would have been, if the dead had any concept of either word) when Nick skilfully parried its swipe and barged it with his shoulder, right into the path of Judith’s flashing blade. She effortlessly carved through the second and third challengers, while Nick planted his heel right into the breastbone of the fourth, knocking it to a scattered heap on the floor.

Fresh warriors were closing in from their sides, but Nick and Judith sprinted forward, leaving them behind; they only had eyes for the Deep-Oak.

The giant had risen to its full indomitable height, standing head and shoulders above even the tallest mammal; a match for giraffes for height and ten times over for lethality. It watched the duo’s approach silently, impassively, its titanic weapon ready in its broad, bony hoofs.

There were other perils to deal with, first; a canine, dressed in salt-worn scalemail adorned with shells and clutching a trident, lashed out at Judith as she ran. Nick snared the points of its trident with his grapple, however, and Judith responded with an arcing cut that sliced through the aged black wood and the skeleton’s spindly neck at once. Its helmeted head fell to the floor, before she collected it with a sharp kick and sent it bouncing into the shins of a second enemy, knocking the hapless blademammal off its feet.

A volley of arrows peppered the earth around them, but the way forward was clear now, and Nick and Judith dashed onward, too swift for the enemy’s shots, Nick making use of his lengthy stride, Judith her brutally-efficient fleetness of foot.

They began to approach the giant, which leered at them coolly, absent rage or battlelust, possessed only of the cold drive to defend its treasure. It raised its massive axe overhead, ready to dash both Nick and Judith against the rocks.

“Ready?” Nick shouted, and tossed Judith the spare end of the rope, which she caught midstride. Then, when the terrible blade came down, with all its promise of brutal ruination, the pair split apart, diving sharply to either side. The blow missed, and only breached a deep crater in the solid earth.

Before the beast could recover its weapon, Nick vaulted the axe’s haft, wrapping the rope around it. Judith pounced forward, diving into the cavern of the giant’s capacious ribcage. She paused just long enough to weave a pattern through the monster’s ribs and spine, entangling its bones, before she tied the rope off in a tight knot and exited through the giant’s back. Meanwhile, Nick pegged the grapple amidst a clutch of deep-rooted stones, anchoring it as securely as fused iron.

The task was done; the beast was rendered immobile, bound to both axe and earth. It watched them both scamper away; there wasn’t so much as a purple flash from its grotesque sockets to indicate this outmanoeuvring had injured its pride or stoked its anger.

They swiftly reached the foot of the towering tree, dodging arrows as they went. As soon as he came to its base, Nick cupped his paws together, into which Judith planted a running foot. Then he gave her a powerful boost, launching her high into the boughs of the tree.

With no wish to wait behind and stand alone against the undead horde, Nick leaped for the lowest branch and began scaling upward, his boots scraping against the tree’s smooth mineral bark. Suddenly, before he could hoist himself to safely, he felt something squeeze his ankle tightly, felt a great weight begin to drag him down. He looked over his shoulder to see a mailed skeleton grasping at his leg.

“Nick!” Judith called from above, and made as if to descend and help him. But he halted her before she could.

“No! Go on and get this shitten gem of yours! Let’s end this!”

She threw a glance back up to the heights of the tree, where the Tooth beckoned her with its radiance. It was so close. With a grimace, she clambered onward, trusting Nick to look after himself.

Nick looked back down at the leering skull below, its jaw lolling open in thoughtless hatred. It had a dagger in its other paw.

With a snarl, Nick raised his free leg and drove his bootheel into the beast’s face. And again. Its jaw exploded in a shower of loose teeth, and the third kick caved its skull in entirely. Its grip on his leg loosened, and he managed to flick the enemy off with a vigorous shake, sending it crashing back to the earth. His triumph was short-lived, however; he could see the entwined giant, a short distance away, straining against the rope, and with a mighty jerk the cord surrendered and snapped cleanly though.

Freed, the giant pawed the stone floor with one great, club-like hoof. Then it charged.

Fear sent Nick’s heart thrashing in his chest, and he swung himself as high into the boughs as he could, his mouth open to warn Judith. But he had barely drawn a breath before the hulking bull brought its axe around in both hoofs and slammed it into the tree’s trunk.

It hit with nerve-rattling force, scooping out a great fissure in the tree and sending a titanic shudder from its base to its boughtips. Nick managed to hang on, but Judith, higher up and unprepared, had her pawhold snatched away. She went tumbling through the air, destined for a crushing collision with the earth, until she reached out and caught the thin end of one waving branch.

Nick watched this disaster unfolding, looking back to the looming beast below, already bringing its axe around for a second blow, preparing to fell the mighty Deep-Oak, to let the amassing skeletal warriors pick them out of the rubble and slit their throats.

He wanted to flee -- cowards, after all, at least often survived to tell the tale of their spinelessness. But there was no escape to be had without Judith, without the gem, and in a terrible flash he realised what he had to do.

Take a stand against this monstrosity. Stand before it in single combat. Dive onto its head and chip its iron-hard skull with his puny knives.

His throat went dry with terror, to the point where swallowing hurt. Then he drew his blades, and locked eyes with his enemy.

“Time to do something amazingly heroic…” he muttered.

And then, a split second before he leaped to his certain doom, something caught his eye.

Something glinting, hanging from the branches just beside his head. Something shiny, that Judith had intimated he would never see.

An apple, or a rough approximation of one; it had sharp geometric angles to it, like an unfinished marble carving, and was lead-grey.

The fruit of a Deep-Oak. A Gorgon’s Treat.

And what had Judith said of the Gorgon’s Treat?

His eyes bulged in wonder at his mighty luck, and he slid his knives back into their sheaths.

“Wait! A Change of plan! Sneaky trickery it is!”

He lashed out and snatched the fruit from its branch, praying his fingers were surely gloved. Then, without a second thought, he pounced from the tree.

The bone giant looked up as he fell, and Nick rammed the apple straight into the beast’s open jaw -- it seemed fitting, though the bull had no tongue to taste it, no throat to choke with. As soon as the fruit touched bone, it stuck fast, like bare skin to winter ice. After this Nick slapped into the beast’s chest and bounced off, landing clumsily on his shoulder, rather less elegantly than he had hoped. But, lying flat on the ground, he had the most marvellous view of the giant turning quickly to stone, its body eaten up in a wave of grey that radiated outward from its silently screaming mouth. Within moments, it was nothing more than a statue.

But the skeletal threat was still present, and from her position dangling from a branch high above, Judith spotted a platoon of bone soldiers making their way to Nick. With a desperate cry, she swung herself on top of the bough, scampered along its length, and dived towards the heart of the tree, paw extended, fingers curling around the luminous purple gem a split second before the first clattering foe drew its sword over the prostrate fox.

The very moment she took hold of it, the skeletons stopped. Frozen still, as if some sorcerer had uttered an incantation and sucked all time out of the world. And then, with the magic that powered them taken away, they collapsed into heaps of threatless bones and worthless armour.

Nick got to his feet slowly, paw pressed to his throbbing shoulder. The sudden reversal from certain death to perfect safety came as a jolt, and when he finally felt comfortable that this good fortune was no illusion, that their lives really had been spared, he spun around and found Judith, staring back from the midst of the Deep-Oak’s branches.

He grinned victoriously, and was about to congratulate her on her exceptional athleticism, on a mission brought to a successful terminus -- to ask if she had seen that utterly swoon-worthy feat of selfless bravery he had committed.

The words died in his mouth, however; the cave had begun to shake.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh no! Just when you thought the danger had passed!
> 
> I'm going to follow the advice of one commenter and keep any potential wildehopping to myself, but the savvy readers will have picked up that the one-sided antagonism in this relationship is starting to shift, as is their penchant for working together. It could be an encouraging sign...
> 
> Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the hard-won insights one of my editors delivered up about how magic works in this universe; how the the fruit could tell the difference between the leather of Nick's glove and the bone of the giant's jaw. It made for deeply entertaining reading; likewise a slightly unnecessary detour to identify that Medusa's power to petrify with a glare was largely unscientific. Hence on the penultimate chapter, I leave you with this advice; get proof-readers with a sense of humour.


	10. Triumph

It began as a slight quiver, like a wounded beast with raised hackles. But it soon become a deep tremor, a groan from the earth itself. A warning of what was to follow.

Nick felt the ground move, and he leaped aside as the floor beneath his feet cracked and shifted. Streams of loose rock came tumbling down from the ceiling, promising larger boulders would join them momentarily.

They had ripped the gem -- the sustenance, the beating heart -- from the mountain’s chest, and sent it into thrashing decline. It was not, it seemed, destined to die peacefully.

“Judith! This place is going to cave in! We need to go, now!”

He spun on his heel and started running, the deafening _crack_ of falling stone intensifying around him as the cave’s roof began to shake itself apart.

Still in the heights of the Deep-Oak, Judith started to scale down, struggling to keep a sure grip on the shaking tree. Suddenly, the whole trunk gave an enormous heave upward, its stony roots ripping out of the earth as the ground buckled and surged like a storm-wracked ocean. A brilliant purple light radiated from below, and Judith realised the tree had been perched upon an amaranthite vein of frankly inconceivable proportions; perhaps this vast deposit was the source of the Deep-Oak’s miraculous fertility, its stunning size and girth. She had little time to process this, however, as the wounded tree succumbed to the titanic stress wreaked upon it, and it sheared in two at the point where the bone giant’s axe had inflicted a deep gash.

Judith’s stomach churned as the top of the tree pitched suddenly forward, and her with it. She fought off the nausea of the plunge, and clung on with desperate strength as they both rushed toward the ground. Then, a moment before they crashed against the granite, she leaped away and landed in a tumble, turning end over end, inviting Gods knew how many bruises she’d need to nurse tomorrow. The tree did not survive the fall so gracefully; it shattered like an ice sculpture, splintering into a thousand fragments. A sad end for such a rare marvel, the likes of which eyes might never again lie upon.

There was no time to spare a thought in mourning, though; sitting on the ground, she could feel the earth parting beneath her, and she had no desire to see if the growing fissure would be wide enough to swallow her. She got to her feet and chased after Nick as the cavern shook, stalagmites collapsing like the pillars of a heretical temple beset by the wrath of a rival god.

He was well ahead, and as he dashed by the point where they had entrapped the giant, he scooped up their abandoned grapple and the longest surviving length of rope. It was scarcely a few yards long, but it would be enough to get them over the chasm, the last barrier between them and safety. If one disregarded the collapsing cavern.

He came to the chasm’s edge as he finished looping the rope through the grapple’s eye and peered into its unlit depths. Huge cracks, shaped like forked lightning, were spreading upward from below, breaking off great slabs of black stone that fell into the void. In no great time, the chasm would be too wide for them to cross.

Nick had been rather short on favour with the Gods for a long while now, but as he began to spin the rope in his paw, he offered as honest a prayer as he could muster that the grapple and rope and the rock of the cliff held firm long enough for them to swing across.

Suddenly, a gauntleted paw took hold of his waist, and he heard Judith say, “There’s no time for that!” At the same moment, he saw a sparkle of blue, and without a moment to prepare, Judith’s magic took him by the collar, by his clothes, by his various accoutrements, and launched him bodily into the air, hurling them across the divide.

They landed hard, tripping and sprawling, their exhaustion starting to tell. And just as well; a great boulder came spiralling from the disintegrating ceiling and struck the ground before them like a mason’s hammer, raising a plume of smashed rock. It missed them by the slimmest of margins.

“Keep that gem of yours near! We’ll need it to open the portal!” Nick shouted as they got to their feet and took off again, zigzagging in a frantic bid to avoid the assault of debris falling from above.

Judith began to lag behind, sucking great mouthfuls of air to her labouring lungs. She was still unrecovered from their first sortie, and her magic invocations had burned through what little vitality she had recouped.

But she was not about to surrender here, and she funnelled every last ounce of stamina she had remaining into her aching legs. Ahead, Nick wasn’t holding out much better, his muscles screaming for mercy, an agonizing fire ablaze in his damaged shoulder.

They couldn’t keep this up for long.

They came upon the mouth of the tunnel, rushing inside without so much as a glance backward. The tight confines amplified the clamour of the mountain’s devastation, turning it into a deafening roar that battered their ears. Worse still, the once smooth walls and floor were now imperfect, run through with growing cracks.

The darkness was abruptly banished when Judith mustered the power of her gem once again, and a familiar point of white light appeared at the tunnel’s end. By degrees it began to grow. But would it be fast enough?

The collapse of something huge sent a beastly tremor underfoot. Nick felt chunks of gravel pepper the back of his head. The portal was still far too small for them. Beside him, Judith screamed.

They made it by the most minute sliver of time; moments before the tunnel was sealed in with fallen rock, the portal widened fully and the pair dived through, landing in a sprawl on the hard earth outside. They were followed by a billow of dust and grit, spewing out of the tunnel’s shattered entrance.

They had dodged death. Just.

Nick lay still for a moment, fighting to calm his heaving heart, before he finally found the strength to prop himself up on one elbow. It seemed they had won a gamble against incredible odds; their burial in the mountain’s lightless depths would have been the surer bet, and yet here they were, delivered back into the safety of the open-aired world. So too, the night was surrendering its clawed grasp on the sky, and he could see a streak of pale light over the horizon, the crown of the day to come.

He turned to face Judith, who was breathing deeply and desperately, as if she had been fished out of the sea half-drowned. Her eyes were clamped shut from the torment of her exhaustion.

“I wasn’t sure I’d see another day,” Nick muttered, getting up on shaking feet. “I’m disappointed that it looks like every other lousy sunrise I’ve ever seen; you’d think the daybreak after surviving certain death would be a little more entrancing. Here.”

He unclasped his water-skin and tossed it to Judith, who had mastered the pace of her breathing and opened her eyes. They were red-rimmed with fatigue, glassy with surprise at their survival. She yanked the cork from Nick’s water-skin with her teeth and drank greedily, dousing the fire that burned at the top of her throat. But that there was a fire to douse at all, that there was pain from a legion of scrapes and bruises vying for her attention -- these were all reminders that she was alive. She smiled as she passed the water-skin back to Nick. They had triumphed…

Something stopped her from celebrating, though. She wondered at first that it was mere pessimism, but if she strained her ears, she swore she could hear something.

Nick finished guzzling from his skin, and opened his mouth to speak when Judith raised a paw to silence him, her ears atwitch. The noise was muted, audible only with effort, but definitely there.

A low, building growl. Distant, but approaching. Inevitable.

She turned to the mountain’s peak, and her eyes widened in despair. Nick, too, followed the line of her gaze, his body going slack with disbelieving shock.

Above them, the entire facing side of the mountain had begun to crumple inward, devouring itself from the inside out, the death rattle of its caving rock echoing far across the dawn sky.

The mountain was collapsing. And born of its destruction was a new disaster -- a surging, consuming wave of disintegrating rubble, plunging down the slopes, reducing everything in its path to nought.

An avalanche. Heading straight towards them.

Without another word, Nick and Judith spun and raced down the mountain, fleeing the hateful peak’s parting gambit with speed born of death’s terror.

Nick thought his reserves of stamina would be a dry river bed by now, nothing but cracked clay and dust. But few things motivated like the fear of a certain demise, and he summoned forth a great tide of vigour from somewhere within, pouring it all into this one last feat of endurance.

He guessed Judith was searching for such a stream, as well. But she had spilled more than he this day -- she’d had the closer brush with death, breathing water in the belly of the mountain; had shouldered the burden of channelling the magic of the Tooth -- and she began to fall behind. When Nick chanced a look over his shoulder, he saw that he had outpaced her by several yards. The landslide was gaining on them both, its infuriated roar boring at his ears like some insidious burrowing larvae.

Judith saw his look, saw him slow his pace to a jog, and shouted a clear warning with her failing breath.

“Don’t you stop for me, fox! You go on!”

But he didn’t heed her; he came to a near-stop, letting her catch him up. And then, to her surprise, he scooped her off her feet, cradling her as one might a tender cub, and started downward again, as swiftly as their combined weight would allow.

Judith was shackled by fatigue, and even if she wanted to protest -- being held, her body numbly wanted to -- she couldn’t. She merely rasped, “What are you doing?”

“We can’t outrun this falling mountain, Carrots! We’re too slow! It’s going to kill us both!” Hearing it stated so plainly made Judith’s heart sink, like a lead weight in deep water. “We need to think of some other way to survive this, and time isn’t on our side!”

Nick was desperately picking the surest path he could in the semi-dark, knowing a poor step, a sudden fall, would spell their ends, and the danger increased with every frantic step they took.  He vaulted a shallow gully cut into the rock, and momentarily considered stopping to take shelter in it, but the idea was quickly discarded; it was too slight to offer them protection, and they’d be crushed in it just the same as if they were standing in the open. Nick’s mind spun; for the second time today, he found himself in the unpleasant position of having run out of option, and with no smart trickery up his sleeve.

But it was Judith -- withered, exhausted, iron-willed Judith -- who rendered their salvation; suddenly, there was a brilliant azure glow in her paw, and Nick saw her intentions clearly.

“You can’t!” he huffed, nearly dropping them both as he skated over a patch of loose gravel. “The task is too great! It’ll suck you dry!”

“Nick, stop,” she commanded; she mustered a steely tone that demanded his obedience, and he came to a halt.

“Trust that I can do this, one last time. Do you trust me?”

A stone, leading the calamitous pack to come, bounced by them, like a payload launched from a catapult, raising thunderclaps with every bounce. But Nick shut the noise out, staring straight into her unblinking purple eyes.

“Alright, Carrots. I trust you.”

“Good. Whatever you do, don’t drop me…”

The avalanche was almost upon them now; it raised the most terrific cacophony imaginable, as if the world entire was coming apart. In the dawning twilight, it appeared mostly as a shifting black shape, a vast shadow unbound from its host. It was seconds away.

And then, a bare moment before the crest of the slide swept over them and smeared them against the ground, the light in Judith’s paw exploded, radiating outward in a sea of blue. The air before them suddenly become an unyielding shield, and the first stone bounced over them, turned aside as easily as one might swat a fly. In short order, the two were cocooned in a sea of noise and chaos as the devastating rockslide rolled over them. But it did not touch them, and Nick finally allowed a spark of hope to flare.

“Carrots! You’re doing it!” he whooped.

Then he glanced down, and saw a mammal blind and deaf to all but a single impulse; she was directing every shred of willpower she had left into holding back the stone tide, and it was clearly taking its toll. Her teeth were locked together, her eyes narrowed in a pained squint. She probably couldn’t hear him at all.

“Hold on!” he cried. “It’s not long now! You’ve nearly done it!”

Then, mercifully, the sound began to abate, and the rocks became fewer, dwindling to nothing more than a few rolling boulders. The sundered peak had finally spent its fury.

The light from Judith’s blue gem suddenly winked out, and Nick felt her go limp in his arms. His first impulse was to check her breathing, but the danger had yet to pass fully; a few last stones, a few last drops of blood from the mount’s fatal wound, were pitching towards them.

Nick side-stepped the first, easily hefty enough to break his skull if it touched him. He dodged the second, as well. But something smaller -- something, he thought, that threw off an entrancing sheen of light -- was following it closely behind, and it struck him right on the crown.

The world vanished.

 

\-------

 

When Nick awoke, the morning was no demure splash of pale light on the horizon, but an impossibly beautiful golden flood cast against a rose sky; the sort of sight a poet might toil their whole life to capture, to write sonnets of that could never hope to portray its true and complex beauty. It was a shame Nick was savouring it alongside what felt like the worst hangover ever inflicted, along with a barbaric host of bodily pains that stabbed at him all over.

What on earth had he been drinking last night? Madam Katzenjammer’s Tar-rum?

And then it all came rushing back to him: the avalanche; the dread of a sure demise; a sparkling blue light. Judith’s drooping figure.

He sat bolt upright, and saw her prone body lying close to his. He reached over to her, jabbing his fingers to her neck to find a pulse, and breathing a sigh of relief when he felt one.

Then he turned aside and retched as his vision swam. One final memory returned to him; a weighty stone striking him right in the head. The explanation for his ruinous headache, he guessed.

He reached up and tested his forehead, finding an impressive swollen egg perched there, just as Judith stirred beside him, groaning as she managed to lift herself into a sitting position.

“Oh, blood of my ancestors,” she muttered, pinching her eyes with her fingers. She felt as if someone had distilled pain into a tonic and forced it down her throat. “I’ve never felt so wretched in all my days. Am I dead?”

“A fine morning to you too, Carrots,” Nick muttered through a grin. “And if you’ll open your eyes for a moment, you’ll see that we’re very much alive.”

She did, battling against the brilliance of the morning sun to survey the peak from whence they’d came. There was nothing to see; all trace of the mountain’s high summit had vanished, spread as crumbled stone from here to the valleys below.

She turned back to Nick and saw the tender lump perched on his head, like an egg in a fool’s balancing act.

“What happened to you?”

“Well,” he mumbled, giving the bump a gentle poke, “your magic protected us from _most_ of the landslide.”

“I missed some of it?” she asked, failing to keep a smile off her lips. “I feel like I should apologize; that looks _unbearably_ painful. And rather silly, as well.”

“As much as I’d value a sarcastic apology from you, Cotton-Tuft, I don’t think it’s necessary.” As he spoke, he picked up the stone that had dealt him the injury from his lap where it had come to rest. “But I will be keeping this. As a reminder that I’m even harder to kill than I thought.”

The sentimental reason was as good as any, Judith supposed. Although, the fact that he had been knocked senseless by a lump of priceless amaranthite easily as round as his paw was good as well.

And Judith was happy to let him keep it. She had, after all, claimed her own prize; she looked into her cupped paws where the two Teeth sat nestled together. Finally, after all this time, she was one step closer to setting the ills of the world right again.

Victory was possible.

Nick got unsteadily to his feet, slipping his treasure into his rucksack, and then fixing Judith with a look.

“Well, rabbit. As deeply as I’ve fallen in love with the quiet solitude of this place, it might be time to leave, seeing as you have your precious jewel. You owe me a tidy sum for this venture, and I intend to spend every coin that’s mine on wine and soft bedding at the first opportunity. I’m not likely to find such up in these wretched mountains, am I?” He reached out a paw for her, to pull her to her feet.

Judith found herself unable to object. They were still exhausted, barely recovered from their ordeal, but she found this triumph had filled her with bursting desire to see the next step underway. She already felt she knew where they needed to go.

So, she took Nick’s offered paw, and they made their way down the desolate path, back towards civilisation, towards a world that knew nothing of their toils, that cared nothing for its saviours.

Overhead, the self-same crow circled them, calling in its shrill voice and watching them with blank, unblinking eyes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a hoot. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed slaving over it.
> 
> I'll share something with you, readers; I don't imagine you as a bunch of fanboys/girls desperate to prolong your enjoyment of a movie. I see you as consumers of literature. If your going to commit your support to me by reading, then I feel you deserve the real deal: considered character development; an intriguing yet grounded plot; literary technique; expectations validated and subverted. It's this that stops me from every handing over what I'd personally feel to be substandard material, from packing it in and posting "nearly-good-enough" when I'm exhausted and empty of ideas. It's why this story had been stationary for a few weeks.
> 
> I'm hoping the fact that Wounded World seems popular is a confirmation that I'm achieving that goal. If so, thank you. You're my inspiration.
> 
> A brief thank you to my two indefatigable proof-readers is necessary. You pair are making my life so much more survivable. Cheers.
> 
> Now, if I remember correctly, I've left a rabbit captain and her fox lying gathering dust for too long. And if you prefer swords-and-skeletons to pistols-and-pirates, don't despair; the Custodian and the Sell-Sword will be making a reappearance soon enough.
> 
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
